


Electric Slide

by tigersilver



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Apparently some dubious consent, Crazy uni students, Fluff and Smut, HDS Beltane Fest, M/M, Mad Scientists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 16:12:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15465195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigersilver/pseuds/tigersilver
Summary: Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are senior students at Flamel University, working with ‘Emma’, the world’s only Electro-Magno-Magical Machine. Snape (a wily old snake and their self-assigned dissertation supervisor) has arranged their attendance at Flamel, deeming them unfit for adult life in the Wizarding world immediately after the final battle with Voldemort. They are partnered from the start (and soon sort out a mutually pleasing relationship on the side) and have been working closely with the university’s hand-me-down, hobbled-together EMMM to develop new types of industrialized and/or automatized incantation. This is a series of vignettes culled from their academic lives and culminating in the celebration revered by all Wizarding folk, Beltane.





	1. Chapter 1

**Title:** Electric Slide  
**To:**[](https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=twistedm)[ **twistedm**](https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=twistedm)  
**Author:**  [](https://tigersilver.dreamwidth.org/profile)[ **tigersilver**](https://tigersilver.dreamwidth.org/)  
**Pairing:** H/D, implied SS/SB  
**Rating:** NC-17  
**Warnings:** *Mild peril. Established relationship. Mentor Snape. Post-war; EWE, AU. *   
**Story notes:**  Fundamentally, this is a tale of new growth from old roots, youthful romps and silly pseudo-science. Superficially, it’s a series of vignettes. Sadly, it’s not as specific as my dear prompter wished for, and for that I am sorry. I do hope you enjoy it despite its failings and deviations.  
**Word count:**  27,000  
**Summary:** Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are senior students at Flamel University, working with ‘Emma’, the world’s only Electro-Magno-Magical Machine. Snape (a wily old snake and their self-assigned dissertation supervisor) has arranged their attendance at Flamel, deeming them unfit for adult life in the Wizarding world immediately after the final battle with Voldemort. They are partnered from the start (and soon sort out a mutually pleasing relationship on the side) and have been working closely with the university’s hand-me-down, hobbled-together EMMM to develop new types of industrialized and/or automatized incantation.. Their ultimate goal: to earn their Dominae Magicae or, in uni parlance, the ‘Grand MMer’ ( _Magi magesteri_ , Doctor of Magic), and to become fully independent, wage-earning adults. Strictly as a bonus, they happen to sort out how previously impenetrable barriers (such as the Veil) might possibly be safely breached by way of their invention, indicating a certain person of interest might eventually be retrieved. This discovery, oddly, is apparently of great scientific interest to one Severus Snape. This is a series of vignettes culled from their academic lives and culminating in the celebration revered by all Wizarding folk, Beltane.  
**Disclaimer:**  Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.  
**Betaed by:**  [](https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=lonerofthepack)[ **lonerofthepack**](https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=lonerofthepack)  
**Author's Note:**  Dearest [](https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=aquila_star)[ **aquila_star**](https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=aquila_star) , thank you so, so much for your valuable input!   
  
  
  
_**“We postulate that the ‘port’ aspect of the modified portkey will be altered sufficiently by magno-magical pulses to allow for short entrance into the non-physical realms. This to specifically refer to the Aether, the Afterlife and beyond the Veil, the last currently housed in DOM, the Ministry Building. The EMM Machine (or ‘Emma’, as she is known familiarly) is capable of establishing a series of cascading ‘switches’ on the ‘port’ orientation of a pre-programmed portkey, similar to binary coding as the Muggles use for programming their thinking machines. By priming these ‘switches’ through repeated exposure to the intended destination or simulacrums thereof, it is possible to employ the modified Key to latch upon a specific target of its own volition and thence to bear same to another location, corporeal or non, without harm to the attached subject or overlarge a drain on the casting Wizard(s). Sufficient pre-data sampling has shown that…”  
~Extract from the preliminary draft joint Dissertation submission of D. Malfoy and H. Potter, Flamel U. 2002. **  
  
2001, Autumn, Department of Graduate Research, Flamel University. Subterranean Corridor Three-A, First Dungeon Level, Electro-Magno-Magical Research Department  
_  
“Shocking!”   
  
Grey eyes wide as pie pans, pupils blown, razored fringe flying, lips pursed dramatically, pale eyebrows a slashy semaphore signal: a bored Draco Malfoy prowled the hallowed corridors of academe once more and Harry Potter was—once more— his favoured target.   
  
“Shit, but you startled me!”   
  
The sconces flared out of control in the surge of magical backwash. Potter, being Potter, balked and dodged. His stomach growled in sympathy, or maybe from the exertion.   
  
“Got you.” Malfoy grinned and made a strategic grab for it, nimbly circumventing Potter’s diversionary feint. “So,  _so_  gotcha, yessss!”  
  
The dazzle of white on white on white that was Malfoy in a poorly illuminated corridor was blinding. Potter blinked rapidly, a scowl growing, one hand on his trim belly.  
  
“Mine, mine, mine,” Malfoy trilled happily. “Yep.”  
  
“ _Whaaat_?” his victim demanded of his attacker gruffly, his eyebrows all twitchetty-antsy in burgeoning temper, arcing black lightning in motion. “Oh, no, you don’t!” He made an abortive break for it; failed. “Lemme go!”  
  
“Uh-uh.” Malfoy didn’t. “Come along then. Places to go, Potter—things to do. I have plans for you.”  
  
“No, you don’t! Leave off now; I’m serious.”   
  
Potter snapped his teeth; his efforts to evade smartly checked. He was swarmed about with hands intent settling his hip and arm into some arcane position, then a smart foot was suddenly nudging his instep—and then he found himself neatly waltzed—and also tangoed—several lengths-worth down the low-lit hallway.  
  
“Lovely,” Malfoy observed, beaming down upon him in an attractively superior manner. “You’ve improved, I think. Much more sure-footed. Ballsier in the overall offense. Well done, Potter.”  
  
“Wanker!” his unwilling dance partner burst out, panting after the final fast twirl and a dip. “Silly damn wanker! I’m not dancing with you either, idiot! I’m for supper.”   
  
“Hah,” Malfoy sneered sweetly, clicking his heels and inclining his fair head. “Yes, you are and no, not at all—and lastly, no. Not yet. Really, Potter. Not a wanker; you know you love it.”  
  
“Don’t! I  _don’t_ ,” Potter insisted. He glared up from beneath grouchily gathered brows. “And  _do_  listen to me for once, you infantile arsehole.  _Stop_  this infernal sneaking up on me.” He grumbled wordlessly under his breath when Malfoy essayed no reply but the unabated smirk. That, and a more in-depth grope as he subtly angled his companion nigh upon a close-by wall. “Oh, for Merlin’s sake, Draco,” Potter fussed, resisting. “Desist! You know for a fact I don’t like it.”   
  
“Liar. I know no such thing.”   
  
Potter scowled fiercely, as if very fierce scowling were the last possible word to be had on the subject of abduction-by-waltzing. “I do,” he insisted, attempting to edge away unsuccessfully. “ _Not_. Don’t dare call me a liar. I am not and hardly ever have been a liar, Malfoy.”  
  
“Bugger that for a lark,” Draco grinned devilishly, clearly not impressed as all that. “You do too, my sweet Potter.” He stood proudly over his prize, crowding him and pawing him, nudging closer with knee, shin, hip and chest, and generally carrying on with his glad-handed grabbing. “You lie. You lie like my bloody flying carpet, right this moment. Pah! Like it, love it, deny it—what _ever_. It’s still a good thing, isn’t it? Being wanted. And I do want you—so. That’s the point, see? C’mere, won’t you? Squirmy git.”   
  
“Oh, blast,” Potter sighed resignedly as he was settled securely within two long arms clad in the white of the regulation lab coat. “And damn. Why do you  _always_?” he demanded, clearly unhappy with his position as the filling in a Wall-Potter-Malfoy sandwich. “Always?” He shook his head in blatant disgust. “I mean, why  _must_ you? I _don’t_  want—oh, never mind.” His lips turned up suddenly at the corners; a much brighter mien settled upon him overall as he raised his chin to meet Malfoy’s stare directly; tactics were clearly changing. “There’s food! Roast beef today and jacket potatoes. It’s dinner time, nitwit. Your very favourite, too.”  
  
“You  _do_ want,” his personal nemesis persisted sternly. “And fuck food,” Malfoy huffed as if food was something entirely beneath him. “Roast beef, bah,” he shrugged. Stomped a heel softly, as if Potter was annoying him with his obfustication over comestibles. “Food in general,” Malfoy pronounced superbly, “is for plebeians. It is the lowest rung of the hierarchy, dear Potter. Good company, now…” He arched a lean brow meaningfully. “Is much preferable. As I said, winsome wee warrior of mine—come along.”   
  
“Urgh.” Harry glanced behind him, acknowledging the wall and its obdurateness. Shook his head slowly, blinking away weirder-than-odd Malfoy’s take on nicknames…or had that been an endearment? Who knew; who could ever tell with a Malfoy, anyway? “No. No, it isn’t. It isn’t, Malfoy. It’s for normal people, food is, of which you are apparently not one. Demonstrably.”   
  
“Pish-tush.” His grinning arch-enemy only pecked at Potter’s nose tip, tickling it with the tip of his tongue. “Cute,” he sighed happily, withdrawing reluctantly and licking his lips. “You’re very cute. Don’t care about that nonsense. Let’s be off, my grouchy lovely. Emma awaits. There’s a cot with our name on it. Or…” His face twisted, eyes lighting up like fairy-lights, “or,” he purred, “we could do this here. Right here…hmm.”   
  
The tongue was applied a second time, meditatively.   
  
“Um. Yes. Yes, I think so. Don’t you?”   
  
“Bloody Merlin,” Potter fumed, angling frantically to avoid having his nostrils drenched by the tongue tip Malfoy taunted him with, tickling. “I am not cute! And I am not going with you, Malfoy. And why must you do this here, of all places? It’s wide open; anyone might come along.  _Snape_ , for gods’sake! And would you please,  _please_  stop with that?” he batted a hand up in the air, motioning impatiently. “You’re drowning me in saliva!”   
  
“See here, Potter,” Malfoy sneered, withdrawing and going cold as all Siberia, all at once, as if a frost Giant had struck him. “No…and again no. Not. Shan’t.”   
  
The wall met Potter’s spine with a gentle thump as Malfoy planted him there, firmly.   
  
“Read my lips, Potter. Nnnnnn. Ohhhhh.”   
  
“Oi!” Harry Potter reflected wryly, as he met a grey gaze that was adamantine as any old wall. “I won’t, you barking mad blighter. I’m not doing that sort of thing against a frigging wall again—remember last time? _Do_ you?”   
  
As walls went, the University’s were no more ideal than Hogwart’s walls had been a fortnight before, upon the occasion of a usual monthly appointment with Headmaster Snape. When the same exact ridiculous scenario had taken place down the bottom of the Headmaster’s office spiral stairwell, albeit with an ambient sense of fondly displaced nostalgia, his spine had been jarred then as well. Malfoy had to resort to massage therapy, later. Much later.   
  
“Um,” Malfoy grinned, “…brilliant. Yes. That was a good one, Potter. Does not deter.”   
  
“Let. Me. Go, Malfoy,” Potter tried it again, scrambling to solidify his expression into one deathly serious and well,  _meaning_  it. “I mean it,” he stated firmly, brows lowered dangerously. “This. Is.  _Not._ Happening. Get off me.”  
  
“Um.”   
  
Malfoy seemed to briefly consider their current position relative the wall, the corridor and the remainder of Flamel U., the denizens of which were to be heard far and up away in the distance, thundering off down stairwells and across ancient pavers to the dining hall.   
  
“Hmm.”   
  
“Yes?” Potter’s face briefly brightened with semi-hopeful anticipation…but then Malfoy jerked his chin just once in the decided negative, peering down at Potter through a welter of ice-blond lashes.   
  
“No?” Malfoy replied at long last, blinking those same eyelashes slowly, quizzically and very much cat-ate-cream. “No.” They glittered silver-gilt in the sconce light. “No, not a chance,” he added, clearly enjoying having the last word. “ _No_.”   
  
“But…but,  _why_?”   
  
Harry Potter shook his end-of-day, ‘work is finally over’ mop, the very tendril-y ends sparking blue-black with a rapidly rising-to-the-boil sense of frustration.   
  
“Problem?” Malfoy was entirely unfazed.   
  
“Why  _now_ , then?” It was a despairing howl, muffled immediately by twisting, grinning lips that descended abruptly, smashing at first but then clinging with all the sweetness of honey for an exquisitely long moment.   
  
“Oh! Nhnmm, stop that, I say!” Potter frowned, drawing his brows into nearly a single line. “Stop slobbering on me, okay? Now’s not the time and certainly not the place, alright? And  _you_? You’re abso-fucking-lutely barking, Malfoy—you know that?  _I_ know that. For one, you’ve no common sense to your name, not a hair and no sense of public decency; what if someone comes along? And for two, I’m famished, by the way, as I mentioned.  _Starving_. Want some food; going to supper right along with everyone else, before I faint dead away right here on the spot, and I don’t need your silly-arse shenanigans stopping me, Malfoy. Certainly _not_  playing with you today, got it? Too damned hungry.”   
  
He folded his arms across his chest and pursed his lips. Everything about him screamed ‘So there!’  
  
“Poppycock.” Malfoy kissed the tip of his captive’s nose again, clearly uncaring of the faint rumble in his companion’s abdomen, the proof in the pudding his lab partner was indeed in need of substantial sustenance. “I’ll hold you up should you faint, Potter—never fear. Shan’t let you fall.”   
  
When Potter went instantly to swipe his nostril dry with a sleeve end, hard arms clamped down and instantly restrained him.   
  
“Uh-uh, none of that, now,” Malfoy chided, looking briefly wounded. “I see you eyes shifting; you can’t fool me.” Then his expression cleared; the brilliantly white slash of barmy grin redawning. “And, for your edification, Potter, it’s convenient, is all.” A pleased nod accompanied Malfoy’s quick survey of the deserted corridor. “Very.” The taller young man leaned in insistently, pressing every inch of his towering front into Potter’s passively resistant facade. “Most, yes.”   
  
“Oh, now wa—”   
  
Malfoy bent his head and leant in for all he was worth, crowding as much as he could manage.   
  
“Oof!”   
  
Potter was again kissed, long and slow and wet, the smirking lips lingering over damp edges and a pinkened chin.  
  
“Mmm…nnngh! Geroff!”   
  
“Potter,” Malfoy breathed. “Mmm, you do taste delicious. Again, please—and… again. ”   
  
“Bloody—ohgods!” Potter’s spine ground willingly enough into this wall despite his small struggles, and from his lips there issued a pleased groan as Malfoy nibbled and grazed. ”Draco, you idiot! How is this ever convenient?”   
  
“I think it’s perfect,” Malfoy retorted. “Don’t you agree?”   
  
“Not—not really—I don’t—at all! Aah! Hmm…mmh!”   
  
“...But,  _really_ …you do.” The grin was very much arrogantly assured, the eyes alight with dancing mischief. “And I’ll order a tray of supper for us later, I promise. Roast beef makes for an excellent sandwich. Now…kiss me. You fool.”   
  
“Wha? No—oh!”  
  
“Yes.”   
  
Potter’s knees threatened to buckle.   
  
“Yes, yes.”   
  
“…No!...”  
  
Malfoy had a whole arsenal of insidiously devastating techniques, all apparently designed to reduce his ancient archenemy to mush; he was using them diligently.   
  
“You do,” Malfoy cooed, busily exploring Harry’s throat with a fine fervour. “You…know…you…do. Really, really.”  
  
“Nnnnngh! Hah!”   
  
Harry’s head reared back heedlessly as Malfoy positioned his lips just so, suckling at an unguarded earlobe. He thumped his skull in a glancing blow against the rising stonework, which smarted for a half-second, as the stone was quite sturdy, having lasted a thousand years or more. The ambient chill of the dungeon space brushing his dampened lower jaw was making his skin prickle; he shivered uncontrollably. His stomach growled, insistent.   
  
“Oh—you’re chilled. Sorry, Potter. I’m sorry. Here, let me.”   
  
But Malfoy only hugged him fast, sharing body heat. Licked his throat side to side, as if he were the famished one and scrubbed a fast hard hand across Potter’s complaining middle.  
  
“Come on, forget about all that dumb stuff for a minute Kiss me, Potter,” he muttered. “Kiss me, kiss-kiss-kiss.”   
  
Word to deed done and Potter’s mouth was summarily muffled in sporadic spurts. “Well….” he squeaked, when he was able, “I—if you must—”  
  
“Must.”   
  
“Bu—”  
  
“No ‘buts’. Only arses—yours. And about that…. _so_ willing, Potter,” Draco cooed happily, drawing off after one last taste of succulent flesh. “Potter, Potter, Harry,” he singsong in Harry’s ear, proceeding calmly to make hay with the wires that connected Harry’s open mouth to Harry’s rising cock, employing fingers both deft and nimble…and oddly stained with chemicals and ingredients. “Stop your fibbing and just admit it; you want me. You’re gagging for me. Mmm, yes. Just…like…that. Like that.”   
  
“No—look!” Malfoy’s captive squirmed restlessly, feinting sideways in a last ditch bid for freedom, his own traitorous hands notwithstanding. “It’s—this isn’t— _Malfoy_! You know how I feel about this sort of PD—eep!”  
  
“Nawwwm, Harry,” Malfoy mumbled, nibbling his way across a newly exposed collarbone. ”So easy, you’re so easy for me, always. Always, always and I love that. Shut it, do—kiss me again. I want you. I’ll have you, too.”   
  
“I—!”   
  
“You know I will.”   
  
Malfoy snogged—and was snogged in sudden furious return, though his snoggee seemed inclined to bite.   
  
“Bastard!” Potter pronounced at the end of it. “You are a bas—”  
  
“Ah!” Malfoy panted happily, not at all put off. He pressed his advantage, which was now quite decided. “Umm…mmh, you’re hard already.” A hand snaked down between them to grope the evidence. “There, now, see? Told you, Harry.”   
  
“Oh—for fuck’s sake.”   
  
“Yes, exactly.”   
  
Malfoy radiated pleasure over the effects of his efforts. His dampened, well-kissed victim shut gob abruptly and blinked up at him, squinting intently through smeared specs. Draco smiling like that was a sight to see. Malfoys were bloody  _dangerous_.  
  
“Huh,” he snorted, glaring feebly. “You did, didn’t you? Tell me.”   
  
“Mmm.”   
  
Malfoy nodded kindly. Harry glared harder. One could only fight fire with fire, apparently.  
  
“Fine, then! I give it, alright? Have you way, if it’s so important to you.”   
  
He twisted determinedly, unexpectedly putting his shoulder blades into play for leverage sufficient to launch himself pell-mell into Malfoy’s molestation. On impulse—or possibly in retribution—he nipped Malfoy’s collarbone. A mark bloomed almost instantly, darkening with a diffused hematoma in the dim light of the lowered torches.   
  
“Oh…it is,” Malfoy assured him solemnly. “Very much so.”   
  
“But,” Harry stood firm, literally, his legs planted like pillars despite the intrusion of Malfoy’s thigh pressing between them. “But! I am not  _easy_ , Malfoy,” he mumbled determinedly through the fold of fabric he was all at once presented with as Malfoy chuckled over top his head and squeezed him to breathlessness. “Never.  _Easy_. This notwithstanding.” He gasped, threw up his hands for a brief flutter and just as quickly refastened them at Malfoy’s close-buttoned collar. Tugged at it frantically to haul the maddening face down to his level. “I am only cooperating this one time, d’you hear me? Just this once.” Malfoy blinked, silently. “Ookay, understand? Because I do want food sometime tonight and I know you won’t leave off—that’s the only reason. The only. And, in the future, do please wash your bloody hands first if you going to stick your fingers near my mouth, will you? Who knows what you’ve been messing with—mrpph?!”   
  
“Brilliant. Perfect,” Malfoy smirked. “I know you’d see it my way, Potter.” Which last issued from his lips sounding something like “Wa-ur-uudy-sss—rst! Nghnghngh…” to begin with, though the rest was effectively lost to the fingers Malfoy was thrusting rhythmically into that busy orifice.   
  
“No, really—they’re clean, Harry. Trust me.”   
  
Potter retaliated for the mufflement by placing both hands squarely on Malfoy’s chest and pushing with all his might, the wall at his bent back lending leverage.   
  
“Always… _always_ taking…advantage,” he gritted darkly. “Not this time, you won’t. You don’t get everything you want, any time you want it, you know.”   
  
“Oh! So  _mine,_ ” Malfoy purred, staggering slightly and transformed from merely  _pleased_  to absolutely, unbearably  _smug_  in an instant. “Yes, you are, then. And I know that, of course…it’s just.”   
  
“I’m not! I’m not anyone’s, twat! People aren’t property!”   
  
“Of course they aren’t—not in the normal way, Potter.” Malfoy immediately closed the two inch wide gap that had opened between them. “And right-oh, deny it. See if I care. But…eh! Sunshiney chap, aren’t you?” as Harry went to bite him on the arm. “Feisty, too. Just the way I like ‘em. Come at me, Potter. See what you get out of it, yeah? ”   
  
“Grr! Git!” Harry growled.  
  
“Mmm,” Malfoy hummed appreciatively. “I do so like it when you do that…did I say?”   
  
“Urk!” Potter gazed up, finally accepting the inevitable and sagging into his attacker’s welcoming arms. “You’re—I—oh, bloody, bloody hell!  _Fine_ —good! What _ever_! Do you worst, please. Come on.”  
  
“Cute,” was the instant reply. “Wanna shag you.”   
  
“Super! Great! I give in, alright? So…okay, shag me, then,” his captive flirtatiously suggested, affecting a major sea-change. He cuddled closer, pressing his hips into Malfoy’s in a very meaningful fashion. The meet-and-greet of two interested male members made him catch his breath abruptly. “Right now, alright?” he gasped, struggling to stay focused. “Since you want to so bad.”   
  
“Really? Now you’re willing, Harry?” Malfoy blinked fast; clearly he’d anticipated more a fight. “Well, okay the—“  
  
One thigh thrust between Malfoy’s taut ones, so cocks dragged together despite the layers of intervening fabric. “Oh, yes. Yes, I am. Get a leg over, will you? Get it on, you massive tit. Isn’t that why you accosted me in the fir—oh!”   
  
“I always accost you,” Malfoy agreed, between tiny biting kisses. “It’s my very…favourite…hobby.”   
  
Harry laughed, bursting into giggles very much against his will.   
  
“Silly arse.”   
  
“Yes, you are.” Malfoy remarked, obligingly twisting readily tautening nipples and grasping straining abs, skittering a firm, smooth hand down his partner’s tickly ribs in passing. “Very silly indeed and…very much mine. Don’t deny it, Harry.”   
  
“Sodding prick—always going on—!”  
  
“Oh, now, wa—”  
  
“And very much willing,” Malfoy stated flatly, though his mouth quirked wryly. “Least for the moment. Don’t tell me tales out of school, my wee little Potter—it doesn’t become you. Don’t like it.”   
  
“Buggering!”   
  
“Oh, shut it, harry. Grows old, all this fighting. Here, I’ll put paid to that nonsense.”   
  
Malfoy fell to tickling ribs with a will, grinding his hips down into the pelvis of bones Potter could not but help but present. Potter went ballistic in his arms, squirming and biting back squeals.   
  
“I hate—!”  
  
“Scrawny, though,” Malfoy observed mid-attack, sucking a much needed gasp of air and blinking fast at the pleasure of applied pressure. “Eat more, yeah?”   
  
“Fuck you!” Harry giggled, red-faced and painting. “Oh, just…just fuck…. _you_! You did this—and I—oh, bugger  _me_!”   
  
“That’s the idea,” Malfoy nodded urbanely, “specifically.”   
  
“Stop it!”   
  
“Hmm…maybe I will. Maybe,” Malfoy winked, “I might. If… you cooperate.” He drew away the offending fingers, eyeing Potter severely. “Will you, Potter? Cooperate?” He pecked Potter’s nose for the umpteenth time in a row. “I’d very much appreciate it. You’re wearing me out, you know. I’ve only so much energy to devote to this. I’m hungry, too.”   
  
“Oh, hah ha! Sneaky bastard, you got me,” Potter allowed grudgingly, breathing hard and eyeing his erstwhile assailant warily. “How can I not ‘cooperate’ now, you smooth-tongued cheeky bastard? You know, I really can’t stand you. I was  _hungry_. Now you’ve got me all fuddled.”   
  
Malfoy handily ignored the last bit. Slopped his tongue across his fellow student’s cheekbone with barely restrained glee.   
  
“I always ‘get’ you, fuddled or no. Got you right now, don’t I? Despite you.”   
  
“Hmmm.” Potter’s lips twisted wryly; just a little quirk to them that meant ‘Come! Bring it!’ “We’ll see. Haven’t had me yet, have you?”   
  
“Yes I do. Or rather, will. Admit it.”   
  
“I can’t believe…you’re fucking  _unbelievable_ , Malfoy. You do acknowledge that, right? You’re a certifiable pain in my arse. Or just plain certifiable. Which reminds me, can we just…can we just wait? A little longer, please? Get some grub in our stomachs, at least?”   
  
Malfoy smiled. Sweetly.  
  
“I’m an excellent pain in your arse, Potter. So there. And…er, no? We can’t wait— _I_  can’t wait, so. Shall we get on, please? I’ve been very patient, I think, with you. This has taken  _ages_. We could be done by now.”   
  
“Merlin!” Potter giggled again, giving up entirely on trying to stifle it. He buried his flushed face in Malfoy’s armpit and shook with reluctant mirth. “Such an ass!”   
  
“Dick, Potter,” Malfoy stared down his nose imperiously. “I am currently all dick, thanking you kindly. How about it?”   
  
“That you are—no question.”   
  
“Hmmph!”   
  
It was just so ridiculous, the whole situation: stalking and being stalked, as if he and Malfoy were playing hide-and-seek in the hallowed halls of Flamel. Snape would skin them for slacking, truly, if ever he were to catch them.   
  
“But. Seriously, why here?” He did want to know that. There were such things as beds available. Beds being much preferable to walls. They had their own rooms, even though they only ever slept in Draco’s. There was even a cot in the back of the Lab, snuck in just for this purpose.   
  
“Here is brilliant.” Malfoy smiled sweetly again at the feigned lapse in faux scowling and dove in to seal their silent deal with a gap-jawed kiss, sloppy-hot. “Here is here,” he remarked after, as if this pronouncement were a gem of great wisdom. “ _I’m_  here, as it happens. There’s a convenient surface, fancy.”   
  
His voice overrode Potter’s ‘Well, duh!’ completely. The next passing kiss did the rest.   
  
“ _You’re_  here, aren’t you?” Malfoy resumed as if nothing had ever halted the flow of his logic. “That’s why it’s so convenient, see? Focus, Potter. Do follow. You’re supposed to be a bright chap. I read your exam results, remember?”  
  
“I am!” Potter gulped and swallowed. “Very bright, thank you.” He slid a hand between them, pressing down in his swollen bits. “Then, okay—if ‘here  _is_  good’—shag me  _now_ , you prick,” Potter was back on track, mock-stern and with beetled brow, when he was allowed up for air, long moments later. “Before _I_  leave. Here.”   
  
“Uh-huh.” Disbelief was evident. “Right you say. Liar, liar, pants on fire.”   
  
“Hah! Can, too.” Potter shrugged casually, his gaze drifting off into the dim distance. “’Cause  _really_  I can, you know, any time I damn well want, ‘cause you can’t actually stop me. You wouldn’t.”  
  
“Uh-huh!”   
  
“And, say, go  _there_. Instead. Up to supper. The bell’s gone twice now—we’re horribly, terribly late.”   
  
“Supper time?” Grey eyes opened wide as steel pie pans. Malfoy affected shock. “Is it? Already, Potter? Past that, I should say.”   
  
“Yes, supper!” Potter grimaced. “The meal traditionally taken in the evening, genius: supper.”   
  
“Dunno ‘bout that,” Malfoy mused, ignoring the toothless threat in favour of teasing. “I sense conflict.” He stroked his chin with a free hand, pulling a long face. “Scheduling. Here  _is_  convenient, now is more than excellent, but…here might also be discovered. That little sneak Creevey’s creeping about. Supper’s just been rung, I do admit. Heard the bells earlier, too—not deaf.”   
  
“Just an idiot.” Potter mumbled, but Malfoy didn’t pause.   
  
“Hustle-bustle up there, I’d say; might be a few strays still down on our level….hmm. There’s all that. To think of. We could be…” Then he paused, and dramatically, “discovered!’ He nodded, as if to agree with his own conclusion. “As I mentioned: shocking! Isn’t it?”  
  
“So?” Potter’s eyes snapped back to meet a pair of suddenly oh-so-serious grey ones. He sneered as they blinked blandly at him, lifting his chin several inches. Kissed Malfoy’s pointy chin. “And since when has that ever stopped you, Malfoy? From—this?” His brief nod indicated all that was between them at the moment—two cocks, pressing, and a few buttons undone at robe’s collars. “Animal. Filthy, filthy creature you are.”  
  
“Hmm,” Malfoy nodded, smiling. “Possibly.”   
  
Potter was kissed—soundly, and again, and apparently in lieu of a detailed response, though there was a distinct rumble to be heard on Malfoy’s part. Which may have been residual hunger but was more likely frustrated ardour. Potter shrugged at it and participated more fully, returning good as he got, given that he was still the Filling in the sandwich.   
  
The snog was warm…nay, searing. Beguiling, after a bit. It seemed to consist entirely of moving lips that said nothing much aloud—and yet everything of importance: ‘ _Here’s_ important’; ‘ _Now_  is best’…and  _‘I_  need you’. ‘More than food. More than anything.’   
  
…And hands that spread fingers wide across his back, protecting him from the wall’s scratchy surface. And hips, rolling—thighs, pressing—cocks, rubbing through cloth.   
  
“Oh….” Potter moaned, after a moment’s more eager participation, reeling back under the hotness, which was undeniable. “This! This!  _This_!”   
  
“Yessss, this!”   
  
Everywhere, every-fucking-where those lips were and especially all down Harry’s neck: wet, rubbed pink and sensitive with Malfoy’s endless nibbling, and yes…it was enticing all the same and rather mind-blowing. Potter submitted, at last, convinced.   
  
“Mmm, that…precisely,” Malfoy breathed his approval into Potter’s ear. “That’s good, Potter. This. Better than.”   
  
Approval was all well and good but Potter was at the stage of expecting something more…concrete. And…active.   
  
“Nhn! You make no sense!”   
  
When Potter pulled back—with a muffled gasp and a hard squeeze to Malfoy’s upper arms; he was grasping at them with all his might, dragging Malfoy against him; fancy that!—he found himself regarded dead-level by a very interested blond man with a major boner. A man whom Potter instantly concluded was far too smug and otherwise unshaken after experiencing a snog like  _that_. Should be taken down a notch, this man.   
  
“Well?” he prodded, making ready to do exactly that. “Malfoy? You were…?”   
  
“Hmmm,” Malfoy hummed, his quick tongue stilled for the moment and apparently happily occupied with just simply observing Harry in all his tumbled state, nothing else. “Nh.”  
  
“Malfoy!”   
  
“…Hmm, see?” Malfoy shrugged happily. “Here is—most excellent, Potter. As is now. As I said. Hang dinner. And concede the point, do. Tray later.”   
  
“Bugger.” It was all very irritating-making, the situation. “I already did. You win. Have won. Get on with it, then. I’m waiting.” Potter scowled, impatient. His stomach rumbled, reminding him abruptly of the bells. “Barmy arse.”   
  
Pavlovian, yes, but there were basic needs other than sex, too, to be considered. He shifted, the wall cold and hard at his back, as walls often were. “Well? Missing out on beef, nice and rare, I should think. My favourite. Your favourite. So…er?”   
  
He hopped from foot to foot, stumbling over Malfoy’s toes stationed between them.  
  
“What, in Merlin’s name, are you waiting for?”   
  
“Hnh.” Malfoy made no move to follow through, prat that he was. He did set up a little tattoo of toe-tapping; Potter dearly wished to stomp down hard on the offending insole. “Mhmm. Dunno…”   
  
“Malfoy.”   
  
“…Hmm...” Malfoy added, after a long, slow beat, which ratcheted up Potter’s growing sense of internal ire by tens of millions degrees Centigrade. “Then again…”  
  
“Oh my freaking Merlin— _you_!  _Now_ you’re hesitating? All that and now?”   
  
Harry Potter had learnt a few things in his years of post-grad schooling, one being that Malfoys could be wheedled.   
  
“Okay, okay, alright. We’ll play it your way, for once.” He wriggled against the wall at his back, pulling a face as Malfoy smiled down at him, long, slow and brilliant. “It’s chilly.”   
  
The stones scraped at him, irritating in the way inanimate things often were; the slate floor was cold even through his rubber soles.   
  
“ _I’m_ hungry.”   
  
Flamel University was younger in years than Hogwarts but no less forbiddingly constructed; those stone walls were downright uncomfortable.   
  
“Even if  _you_  aren’t, twat for brains. This is taking too long, if you ask me. So stop teasing. And also, okay? This hurts my spinal vertebrae, Draco. So—massage, along with the tray. In the bath, preferably.”  
  
“Ah?” Clearly Malfoy was being offered a clear opportunity to attack. His eyebrows rose disbelievingly. “…Really, now? You’re not comfortable? I should…hurry it up then, shouldn’t I? The process?”   
  
“Really!” Potter gave in to inner urgings and crashed a rubber-soled foot down upon Malfoy’s for emphasis. “Really, yes, you should! Fucking twat! Why is it you now turning tables? Were you just born difficult, Malfoy?”   
  
“Then…I will.”   
  
“Now? Good-oh. Alright, then, finally!”  
  
“…Since  _you_ insist—”  
  
“Please! I insist! I damned well insist upon it. Take me—make me scream, git.”  
  
“Dunno…are you sure, Potter? Positively, absolutely beyond certain?”   
  
Harry inhaled sharply: Draco’s eyes were so all-at-once blazing and tempestuous; so brilliantly alit as to be unholy with sordid promise.   
  
“Oh god.” He licked his lips in slow motion, tongue just flickering out, and Potter swallowed with difficulty, staring at them rapt, wetting his own with a quick slither of pink wet organ tip. “Please?”   
  
“Now?”  
  
“Now, yes! Now’s good.”   
  
“M’okay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Harry.”  
  
Slow motion lunges seemed exactly the right moves to make when there were other pink wet organs to think of.   
  
“Because you’re not the only one famished….”  
  
Quality of relative surfaces forgotten entirely, two sets of lab robes fell disregarded in a soundless hush; the sconces guttered low upon a simple echoing finger snap from Malfoy.   
  
“Now…Potter!”   
  
Level Three-A was deserted, but for them. Thank fuck. But it might not be, soon enough. There was something excessively satisfying about it being ‘now’ and not ‘later’; a certain air of risk that pleased them both. And the latent tinge of supper-wanting echoing through their young guts helped. Was like one sort of hunger teetering atop another primal hunger, eking appetites out by stretched degrees. Thrilling.   
  
Shocking. Waltzing to no music but the waft of air—shocking. Superb.   
  
“Potter?” Potter was blinked at owlishly when the man’s mouth stilled its nipping assault on the underside of Malfoy’s pointy chin. “Potter? Alright? Pay attention, do. I’m ravishing you.”   
  
“Do, then.” Harry shivered uncontrollably. “Please, please do. Want you.”   
  
“Want you too. Always want you.”   
  
Malfoy immediately leant hard against him, intent scribed in every line, every darting glance. Everything about Potter spoke of muted challenge; everything about Malfoy reacted instantaneously, meeting that—topping it with an nth more, a smidgeon higher.  _Hard_  transfigured into  _stone-hard_ , like the granite framework about them. Kisses morphed into assaults on specified nerve endings.   
  
“Potter!” Malfoy joined Potter in the general groaning and gasping. “Potter, Potter, Potter… _Harry_. Give it.”   
  
“Uhnnn…” Every-bloody-thing, from deliberate ankle twisting against shin to trip Harry should he choose to bolt to the cock hot as blazes shoved against the indent-and-contrary bulge of robe-swagged crotch. “Draco—oh!”   
  
Harry keened; Draco grunted. Mouths met, mouths lingered, eyelids went heavy—‘til an echoing thud down what should’ve been an emptied hallway sent them into abrupt stasis. The sound of a...door, thudding, perhaps?  
  
“What was that?”   
  
“Mmm…erm?” Potter’s eyebrows winged up in query. “Dunno?” He twisted his head on his neck, craning to see around or even through the shoulders blocking his view. “Um…maybe nothing? The stairs moving?”   
  
“All clear?”  
  
“Check it, then. Not sure.”   
  
“You.”   
  
“And you, Draco. Together.”   
  
As one, they each glanced about them; one to the left, one to the right: searching and furtive, seeking. Tendrils of magic followed, feeling in all directions.   
  
Cocks throbbed, caught wanting, barely hidden behind skewed fabric. Stomachs rumbled, acid stirred out of limbo. The hall was dim, the sconces at their very lowest, barely flickering. Far in the distance could be heard the creak and groan of their hand-built machine down the hall and, farther still, one and half floors above them, the murmur of faint youthful voices and hundreds of trompling feet, rushing down Flamel’s central stairwell on their way to supper.   
  
“No,” Malfoy stated firmly, after a long moment. “Harry?”   
  
It had been nothing, the sound. Perhaps just the building shifting, as elderly structures were wont to do.   
  
“Clear.” Potter pronounced it. “Yes. S’alright.”   
  
“Come on, then. Come  _on_. Give me.”   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
‘Hang Creevey,’ might almost have been heard, unspoken between them but clearly present. And ‘Sod it if it’s a public corridor; who cares?’ on Potter’s part. ‘Fuck dinner,’ on Malfoy’s.   
  
“Urgh!…If you’re going to?” Potter scrabbled at Malfoy’s hips to haul them closer. “You  _are_  going to, aren’t you, Draco?”   
  
“Oh, yes.”   
  
Malfoy smiled as he dropped chin to nuzzle into the hollow ‘neath Potter’s jaw. He buried his face there, crooning--licking. Sucking to mark. Harry’s eyes closed immediately. It was dim and cold; they were naked and hungry. The wall hurt.   
  
“Brill.”   
  
“Mmh.”   
  
The air about them positively crackled, sending up an eerie echo from the Lab. Emma, waking. It hummed, high and nearly soundless, and the sconces blew out entirely. Fingers dug into Potter’s crack, preparing. He spread his legs wider, making ready. There was oil of out nowhere; smelt of citrus and almonds. Smelt of musk and want.   
  
“Come on.” Not a command so much as a plea. Which of them said it neither knew for certain. Didn’t matter, either way. “Come on.”   
  
“Oh… _I will_.” 


	2. Chapter 2

_**“For the purposes of our experiment, we combined two related uses of the EMMM in a previously untried manner: serialized locator keys and pulsing high intensity light waves. The second was deemed necessary as there was no method of properly calibrating the eventual destination of the altered keys and it was clearly advisable to establish reliable indicators of the amplitude of displacement. In that a portkey is a previously incanted apparate applied to an inanimate object, the light is a gauge of distance and intensity of displacement. The more intense the light, the greater the power and range of the key. It is postulated in Blimey Morrow’s Apparation and Transcendence of Bodily Motion, 10th edition, that a key would require a very high level of power to actually transverse a dimensional barrier and return intact. Also that normal apparates are but a weak shadow of that power as they are necessarily exhausted over a distance spent. This is why portkeys exist in the first place: to provide a focus point impelling a single extremely rapid jump. A well constructed portkey allows for very little passage of perceived time for the bearer….  
…a lumos gauge has the advantage of being perceptible to even a neophyte user…  
…the degree of light thrown has been thus calibrated to be equivalent to the expected distance/strength requirement of the key, following logically from the Hexagonal Equation…”   
~Extract from the preliminary draft joint Dissertation submission of D. Malfoy and H. Potter, Flamel U. 2002. **  
  
  
Spatial locus more precisely: 2001, Autumn Term, Department of Graduate Research, Flamel University of Higher Magicks. Laboratory B, presently occupied by two recently minted graduate students of L‘Ecole la Magie de Giverny, H. Potter and D. Malfoy, assisted in part by F. U. undergraduate D. Creevey. These gentlemen understood to be engaged in researching the various theoretical and practical applications of Electro-Esoteric- Altered Incantations & Potions (familiarly known as ‘the Eeep! Division’, phonetically, withn the localized bounds of the uni) for the purposes of matriculation as accredited Masters Magii. This, under supervisory aegis of one Associate Honorary University Fellow S. Snape, also the sitting Headmaster, the Hogwarts School.   
_  
  
  
“What  _is_  that contraption, Potter?” Professor Severus Snape demanded, peering at it askance. “You’ve gone and altered Emma now? I cannot say as I recall approving that…hm. Were there the proper forms? I don’t seem to—”  
  
“No, Professor Snape,” Harry dutifully replied. “Of course not. Emma’s fine, really.”   
  
Parts of EMMM bubbled, as if on cue, and other bits—rubberized hoses clamped at brass jointures, mainly—sent up showy arcs of ultraviolet sparks, as if making a bit of a splash for the distinguished visitor.  
  
“Well. If it’s a Tesla coil I’m supposed to be seeing attached to this end here, Potter, you’ve gone and botched it, the both of you. Where’s your bloody manual? I know there is one—”   
  
“ _I_ haven’t,” Harry replied mutinously. “I mean, it is but I’ve adapted it, Professor. Just see.”   
  
“If I must.” Snape heaved a sigh and rolled his eyeballs, settling back into the chair Harry had ushered him into when he arrived. “And only to facilitate my soonest escape from here, mind. I’ve a Staff Gathering to attend in thirty, so make it quick. What  _have_ you gone and done to her, Potter?”  
  
“I’ll show you, Professor! And—and it’s nothing bad, trust me.”   
  
“I must admit,” Snape grumbled under his breath, turning his eyes to EMMM, “I truly hate it when you say that, Potter.”   
  
“Just watch, Professor—that’s all I ask.”   
  
With a flip of a switch the machine burbled and light flowed liquid, fountaining up from a centre cylinder and descending rapidly down a series of ranked glass tubing courses.  _Chug-a-chug_ , moaned the coils and the cogs shaking them, and the subterranean room warmed ten degrees instantly.  _Chug-a-chug!_  
  
Harry wiped sweat off his brow with a hastily donned dragonhide-gloved hand and casually tossed a sample onto the platform.   
  
“See, now? Just as I was telling you, sir—earlier. There is goes!”   
  
With a pop the sample disappeared; straight out of existence, perhaps. Snape sneered sourly, which he did anyway, most days, it being his usual expression.   
  
“Yes? And?”   
  
“It’s gone,” Harry went on cheerfully, stating the obvious and blithely ignoring his professor’s apparent disinterest. “But not too far and not without us knowing exactly where it is. Transportation, Professor.  _Instant_  transportation! Of inanimate objects! Isn’t that super?”   
  
“And?” The habitual sneer was not in any way impressed, any more than it had been with Harry’s noticeably sloppy shrivelfig chopping skills, back in the day. “Your…point, Mr. Potter, should you have one?”   
  
“It goes right off,” Harry explained earnestly, hand moving to the reverse switch in readiness, “and all the DOM people _ohh_  and  _ahh_  over it for a moment when they see it—that’s where I sent it, of course, because it’ll be DOM in the end, prob’ly—and then I say _this_ —watch me now, Professor. Contrarium iuri!”   
  
The giant Bakelite black handle was thrown back down with a resounding thump; the field glowed blue-violet, and, with a sort of reverse pop, a ‘fwoop!’, the sample—a green Granny apple—was back again. Apparently unaltered.   
  
“D’you  _see_ , Professor?” Harry insisted, nearly hopping with his excitement. “Instantaneous, nearly. On preset command, too, if I should wish it, and I can even serialize the hops now. And it’s perfectly fine, the fruit. Not been altered at all—the key’s static. You could eat that apple if you wanted…” He scowled, pausing to consider. “Though I wouldn’t advise it, actually. Not quite certain when the Contrarium iuri wears off yet.”   
  
“Hmm,” Snape snarled lightly. “Alright, Potter, but what’s the good of it? And how I do I know you’ve transported this particular apple anywhere other than say, limbo, for that matter? I must say, any First Year can Vanish an apple.” Snape snapped his fingers disagreeably. He waggled his soot-black brows. “And any Fourth Year can Summon another—or conjure one from a teacup—or a pantry.”   
  
“Simple teleportation of material items,” Harry replied promptly. “Gampion & Erzats, 1923, sir. But this one can be activated anytime; it’s set up with a timer, like clockworks. Just like in Section Three, paragraph one of my—”  
  
“Oi!” came an outraged yelp from behind the partition. “Potter!”   
  
“I mean  _our_  dissertation, sir—with a twist, though. I can move people, too, same as. Regular people, sir, not just Wizards and Witches.”   
  
“Alright.” The Professor shook his head slowly, gaze drifting slowly over the seemingly innocent Granny apple.   
  
“And again, I say…so?” he shrugged. “My godson’s already done you one better, Potter, and also with actual  _people._ In fact, most have….ah.”   
  
Snape curled a lip, shuddering faintly, as if it pained him to recall even as he brought it up. Harry also blanched. A moment of silence companionable silence feel between them, completely at odds with their usual state of prickle.   
  
“Well. Ahem,” Snape snorted after a moment. “That aside, I must just say…’no’, Potter. I see nothing out of the ordinary in this exercise. No breakthroughs. No creativity. No real thought applied, as of yet. You’ll have to do bet—”   
  
“There is!” Harry scowled instantly. “Really, there is! I’m not finished showing you yet, Professor Snape!”   
  
“Oh, really?”   
  
Snape’s charge strode over to the happily hissing machine, catching up the fruit from the surface upon which it lay, his gloves sparkling faintly as he did so.   
  
“There’s more to it than just  _that_ , alright? It’s not so simple, sir.”   
  
A few strides had him back at his supervisor’s side, thrusting the apple upon him, forcibly. With a glare, Snape made as it to take it but Harry held it away from him.   
  
“Careful! It’s primed. But see, look closely, Professor. Those darkly striated lines pulsing, just here? Where the stem is, coming out? And notice the webbing effect—as if the whole thing’s wrapped in a mesh, yes?”  
  
“Hmm?” Snape tilted his head, consenting to look, though Harry noted he kept this hands well away from the apple. “I see. Cannot say precisely what—”  
  
“That’s the magical charge, concentrated,” Harry gulped hard. “It’s an honest to Merlin portkey, yes, due to the exchange process. But it’ll also take you…other places. Places that might not even exist.” Harry shrugged, tossing his head nonchalantly. “Places we can only imagine, like Valhalla maybe…or even the Afterlife. Try it, sir, if you want. It works perfectly, even for short journeys. You can nip back to Hogwarts; tell them you’re running behind, if you want.”   
  
“Hardly, Potter.” Snape sat smartly, robes flapping round his crossed kneecaps. “I hardly plan to be tardy to a meeting I’ve myself called.” He wafted a dismissive hand. “Aside from that, you suggest I submit  _my_  person to the effects of some wacky spelled fruit, which you’ve no doubted cocked up from the get-go? I don’t think so. Find another idiot, please. I’m not one.”   
  
“Fine,” Harry scowled impatiently. “Fine, then. I’ll show you! Malfoy! Malfoy, show yourself—I know you’re lurking back there, you difficult git!”   
  
He cast about, but his usual lab partner was nowhere to be spied. Silence ticked by in awkward seconds, with no response.   
  
Sighing, Harry e at last turned to the waiting assistant, Creevey. “Dennis, you take it, please. Let’s just keep it simple, for now, alright? Should be set to Paris, Rue de l’Opera. Stroll along and buy us some chocolate croissants at that shop near the Metro and be back in ten minutes. Flat-out, mind—no sightseeing this time.”   
  
“Sir!” Creevey, who’d been jiggling impatiently about the perimeter of the discussion between Headmaster Snape and his personal hero, stepped up promptly, dragging off his safety goggles and transfiguring his robes hastily to Muggle street clothes. “Yes, sir!” He grinned an enormously pleased smile, practically executing a curtsey. “Aye, aye, sir! At your command!” The apple was turned over, with a quiet word of thanks from Harry. Dennis spun on a heel to go and then hesitated.   
  
“Erm….ah? Harry, you want me to bring along a coffee too, Harry? I’ll be happy to—”   
  
“Please,” Harry nodded, a reluctant half-grin creeping across his sullen face. “Sure, yes, if you want. Au lait. Two lumps and—”  
  
“Drowning in whip,” Creevey nodded, wreathed in smiles. “Dash of nutmeg. And a tea for the Professor, right?” He nodded respectfully at the black bulk of Snape, grimly watching from his perch on Harry’s wobbly and rather beaten-up old visitor’s chair. “Don’t worry about a thing, Boss; I know just how you like it. Back in a flash!”  
  
“Hmmph!” Snape harrumphed. “Ten minutes? Now I’ve to wait about another ten minutes, Potter? And what’s to say you don’t have a stash of pastries tucked away just for this purpose?”   
  
“Professor!” Harry huffed. “I wouldn’t!”   
  
“Besides, I hardly think a fake trip to Paris will prove anything useful,” Snape continued darkly. “There’s nothing to say your little Creevey’s not just Apparating by himself to the nearest bakery. It is not as though a Wizard requires extra aid to travel reasonable distances. Quandary, Potter, of the logical sort—how will show your invention’s actually in action?”   
  
“Oh, it will, sir,” Harry jittered with excitement, completely  _un_ oppressed by his mentor’s glowering look. “We’ve done it before—got the data to prove it, too. Got as far as Romania with the very first trial! Charlie sent me these, actually. Came back with the original sample.”   
  
He waved the gloves that decked his arms to above the elbow, all leathered strapping and flapping cuffs, the fingers fit perfectly to each of Harry’s digits.   
  
“Custom-made, sir. Resists pretty much everything; very handy to have nearby, here.”   
  
“You don’t say,” Snape nodded, casting a grim eye on the machine, pipping away just a few feet from them.   
  
“But this _is_  special, sir,” Harry continued. “Really, it is. What I’ve done here. The machine’s the key factor, it turns out—as a byproduct it powers up the portkey incantation to the maximum, so—long distance, Professor!” He waved an arm about widely. “Very long distance—like the Americas, I shouldn’t wonder! And…and farther. Least, we think probably farther.”   
  
“Mm-hmm. Yes, yes, Potter, whatever you—”   
  
“And it doesn’t require a Wizard’s touch at all, sir. Works all by itself, strictly on a priori incantantum. Anyone can programme it and it can move _anything, anywhere_ , really, all by itself. And but think of what a device like this’ll do for international trade, sir! It’s unbelievable!”   
  
“Absolutely,” Malfoy popped his head over the cubicle divider to sneer along with Snape.   
“ _Un_ believable, that is.  _Un_ likely, actually—as I’ve said to you over and over, Harry. Oh! I say.”  
  
“There you are, you irksome arse,” Harry sneered. “I was wondering when you’d pop up.”   
  
Malfoy straightened his elegant line of shoulders under his pristine lab coat and conjured up a suitable air of pleased surprise, as if he’d suddenly noticed his and Potter’s university overseer had stopped in for a visit. He bobbed his blond head at Snape with sudden deference.   
  
“So sorry, Godfather. Didn’t know you and Potter had a meeting. I trust you’re well?”   
  
“Of course you knew,” Harry slipped in darkly. “You’ve been only just waiting for a chance to sabotage it.”   
  
“Shut it, Potter. I am greeting my godfather, here. Have some respect.”   
  
A sidelong glance took in Harry, bouncing on his toes impatiently as he waited for the pleasantries to be over.   
  
“Sod off!” Harry returned. “As if you didn’t—!”  
  
“Hmm,” Snape smirked, making a show of clasping his godson’s hand. “Pleasant to see you, Draco, as always. Family doing well, I assume?”   
  
“Why,ye—”   
  
“You’re damned well taking up my meeting time, Malfoy,” Harry growled, tapping a toe in a nasty sort of way. “Really, piss off. You can show him yours some other time.”   
  
Malfoy immediately looked offended. He stared down his nose at his fellow student and waggled a dismissive, perfectly shaped blond eyebrow.   
  
“Oh, that’s it—what this is all about. Potter here trying to convince you his rubbishing machine’s working properly? ‘Cause it’s  _not_ —there’s glitches and errors all through; damned key’s riddled with them—as I’ve told you, Potter, again and again. Of course you don’t listen— ”  
  
“Tattle tale! Wanker!” Harry interrupted hotly. “Just because there’s a few small—a very few, very small items yet to work through doesn’t me—”  
  
“Got any number of ‘very few, very small’, this,” Malfoy continued urbanely. “Wonky when it goes, mostly. Wonkier still when it comes back—fair throws a person across the room; rip off your arm, maybe. No, sir…they’re painful kinks, more like. Nasty ones—and they show up where Potter least expects them. He can’t be bothered to calculate his way out of an Endless Bag, this one.”   
  
“Oi!”   
  
“You’ll see, I s’pose,” Malfoy nodded thoughtfully, rubbing his chin, “when that poor sod Creevey comes back again with the tea. He’ll be missing something, odds are. Fingers, toes—or mayhap something really crucial, if Potter’s truly mucked it up this time.”   
  
“I see.” Professor Snape eyed Potter querously. “That wasn’t mentioned at all in your note to me, Potter, the safety trials—”  
  
“Because they’ve all come back perfectly within the limits, Prof—”  
  
Malfoy continued, undaunted by the burning glare his lab mate was subjecting him to.  
  
“You know, sir,  _I_  told him he should wait on this; work out the fine-tuning, alright? But no. No,  _he_ wouldn’t have it. He was all agog to show you as soon as he could, the idiot twat. Always in a hurry, Har-ahem! Potter is.”   
  
“Hey! hey, Malfoy! That’s enough, alright? No one asked you to butt in.”   
  
“Hmm,” the Professor hummed, turning a disparaging frown upon his other charge. “Really, I think I do see…now. Potter, is this true? Is that fool Creevey really at risk from your infernal device?”   
  
“Dennis will be fine, Professor!  _Malfoy_ ,” Harry gritted, canines bared, staring from one to the other of the two men eyeing him askance. “And sir!” He faced Snape square on, straightening his shoulders and doing his utmost to appear confident and convincing. “Professor Snape. Do listen to me, not that rachetty scoundrel, alright? It’s my experiment, isn’t it? Not his! Well, this part’s mine at least, the key. And I tell you honest and true we’ve replicated this a hundred times over, Dennis and I. Dennis’ll be just dandy, you’ll see.”   
  
A sniping sideways scowl brought a sneering blond back into the conversation: “So you say, Potter. So you always say—and let’s not forget the thumb I had to reattach just last weekend. When I happened to be asked to help with your little experiment. But, y’know, no matter,” he shrugged. “Prove it, will you? Prove the damn thing’s safe and we’ll see. Because you’re only wasting my godfather’s precious time right now. I said to wait but you won’t list—”   
  
“Sod off!” Harry told him hotly. “No, really, do. Besides, Malfoy, it’s not as though  _you’ve_  made progress, either, with your silly industrial light thingamajigg. Have you now? Pfft! Last count was three fires and two explosions and that’s not incl—”   
  
“Pardon?” Snape sat up straight, his gaze swiveling back to his godson’s taut features. “Draco, am I hearing correctly? You are still pursuing that ridic—”  
  
“All you’ve done is what any old Lumos will do, right?” Harry was galloping ahead, fuelled by anger—and a tinge of disappointment. “I bet it’s that you‘re just plain envious of me, Malfoy, ‘cause I’ve at least had some success and you’ve not.”  
  
“Fuck off, Potter,” Malfoy shot back. “My work’s been progressing exactly as planned, as you know, because you’ve frigging well helped me!”   
  
“Bah,” Harry snarled. “You really are jealous—so petty, Malfoy, begrudging me. And that’s all this is about—Dennis will be perfectly well and you know it. It’s only Paris, alright? So, so—so, hah! Keep your pointy white nose well out of it!”   
  
“Potter.” Snape crinkled his eyebrows fiercely and tapped his toe menacingly. “There is no need to take that tone with your fellows. And further, there is no call to invite me here, waste my time, with a showing of a key that is inherently faulty, either. Now, I’ll take my leave, if you please—”   
  
“Oh! Oh, ho, ho, now! That’s rich, you midget brained, pathological risk-taker!”   
  
An infuriated Malfoy raised his chin furiously and stomped a foot, practically clambering over the shoulder-high cubical barrier to wrap his furiously thrusting hands round his research partners’ throat.   
“Potter, that’s enough of your cheek! You say I’m the one jealous of your work? Pathetic! You’d prob’ly love to think so, damn your famous fucking green eyes, Potter, but I can prove you wrong, you know!”   
  
He whirled to face a sour-faced Snape, his lab robes flapping.   
  
“In fact—in fact, I’ll do it right now! Severus, step over here, to my side— _I’ll_  show you! I was just about to begin the second set of trials in any case—there’s no reason you can’t see how far I’ve come, is there?”  
  
“I am, ahem.” Snape balked visibly, hands gripping the arms of the visitor’s chair. “As I remind you both, already in danger of missing a meeting—”  
  
“No, no, only take moment, I promise,” his godson returned hastily, grabbing at their advisor’s elbow and tugging. “Step this way, sir. Come see what I’ve done with this series—and I’ll prove to you what Potter’s got is no great shakes at all! Mine’s better by far—so much more versatile than any old transportation thingummy. That’s old hat, transporting and Apparating—totally yesterday’s news.”   
  
“It isn’t!” Harry huffed. “It’s completely timely—and—and, what’s more, it’s both practical and powerful! Mine’s a better use and you know it, Malfoy; you just won’t admit it! And—and ,  _I_  can go farther!”   
  
“Oh, merciful Merlin, save me from bloody idiots,” Snape sighed under his breath, and raised two fingers and a thumb to pinch the growing bulge above his prominent nose. His black eyes regarded the two young men balefully. “Must you always,  _always_  bicker?  _Always_? Even now?”   
  
“Er?” Malfoy blinked at his godfather. “…Is that a problem, Severus?”   
  
“Well…” Harry fidgeted in place, looking shamefaced. “Um…actually, well…yes, um.”  
  
“Yes!” Draco snorted the finish, rolling back on his heels with a distinctly stubborn air about him. “Er--we apparently must, Severus! It’s—erm, it’s tradition. Tradition, that’s it. Comfortable tradition—very stimulating for the brain, isn’t it, having a familiar setting to work in? Studies prove, sir, so…We do it for mutual mental stimulation, alright? Good for the juices.”   
  
“That’s true!” Harry crowded up his companions, laying a familiar hand on Snape’s arm to vie for his attention. “It _is,_ sir. Healthy competition and all that. Juices flow and all that rot. We rub along perfectly, otherwise. Houses afire.”   
  
“A—a’fire, Harry? Har!” Draco coughed, impolitely. “Hah! Merlin, your mouth, so—so—oh, but, hang on a moment,  _Potter_. Getting back to it, it’s hardly a competition if I win all the damned time Call it encouragement, instead.”   
  
“ _What_? Draco!”   
  
“Well?” Malfoy humped a casual shoulder. “Gives you a level to work up to, doesn’t it? Bit of a bar raising? Besides, I can’t help it Godfather here always likes my ideas better, can I? Tells you something, that, doesn’t it, Potter?”   
  
“Really, no,” Snape dropped his head to the safety of his open palms, rubbing at his closed eyes wearily. “Must I never expect any peace from you two?”   
  
“Doesn’t it, Potter?” Malfoy taunted, head cocked at a completely unbearably smug attitude. “I’m sure I set you a fine example, just by breathing.”   
  
“Malfoy!” Harry was abruptly furious again; so much so even his hair looked to be electrified, standing straight up in hanks of shiny raven’s wing black here and there as he ruffled an impatient hand through it. “That’s so not true, Malfoy! The Professor adored my last project—didn’t you, sir?” He cast an anxious look towards a po-faced Snape, who groaned quietly into his fingernails. “Thought it was grand, the Professor did! I got full marks on that one—and  _you_! You only got half-credit, Malfoy, so you can hardly talk it up like your shite doesn’t smell just as much—!”   
  
“THAT. IS,” their advisor rose to his full height, undiminished by the passing years and practically quivered with a formidable indignation. “ENOUGH. Both of you.”   
  
“Ooops,” Harry squeaked, prudently stepping backwards in a little stumble. “Erm, ah? M-Malfoy?”   
  
“Ah! Sorry!” Malfoy joined him, his expression rapidly transforming into one of abjectly haughty apology. “Godfather—we didn’t mean to—”  
  
“Ahem,” Snape glared between the two of them and they’d the grace—or good sense—to hang their respective heads. “ _Ahem_! Enough of this damnable pointlessness. As I’m forced to wait about here upon Potter’s convenience, Draco, I suppose I can make time to review your work as well. If—and only if, that is to say, you will both promise to be utterly completely silent unless it is work related.”   
  
“Yes, yes! Sir, I promise,” Harry replied hastily. “Absolute—”  
  
“Yes, Godfather,” Malfoy sighed, clasping his hands behind his back and bobbing his chin. “We promise. Solemnly.”  
  
“Very well,” Snape returned coldly. He affixed Malfoy in his sights. “So? What have you to show me, Mister Malfoy? I can give you one minute exactly.”  
  
“Oh!” Malfoy seemed surprised his godfather had capitulated so quickly. “Step right this way, Severus, and…er, hmm.…all that crap of Potter’s aside, Severus, it really is good for the morale.” He indulged in a few deep breaths to settle himself, straighten his lab robes where they’d brushed against several cartloads of assorted glass tubing and brightly shiny bits of magicked metal. “Our going at it, you know. Spirit of competition and all that.”  
  
“Hah! I’ll give you spirit, Malfoy!” Harry growled blackly, having been abandoned by his professor mid-presentation. “Wanker—always stealing my limelight!” Draco and Snape ignored him roundly. “Fine. Go play with your little lights, then. Make them dazzle us all blind, will you?”   
  
But this was mouthed at barely over a grumbly whisper and the EMMM was humming loudly, obscuring the worst of it. Harry fell into step behind his lab partner and his advisor, grimacing.   
  
“Fine then. What _ever_.”   
  
“Potter.” The Professor sent a stern look over his shoulder. “Potter, be quiet. I’ll be with you again momentarily. Surely you do not begrudge your lab partner a few moments while we all twiddle our thumbs, awaiting your poor unfortunate Creevey?”   
  
“No…” Harry shugged; dug his toe into a crack between the pavers. “Of course not, sir. Sorry.”   
  
“Hmph! I didn’t think so,” Snape set his chin sharply. “Draco, carry on. You’ve forty-six seconds left of my precious time—make the most of it.”   
  
“Yes sir, Right sir!” Malfoy nearly snapped his heels together with an audible tap. “Now, please,” Draco motioned for Snape to pay attention. “Forget all Potter’s nonsense with apples for the nonce. Come here and I’ll show you how far I’ve got with mine.”   
  
“Light, is it not, Godson? What you’ve been working with?” Snape arched a curious brow as he accompanied Malfoy over to the machine’s dial-strewn face. Stem hissed, ruffling the hems of their robes as they passed. Potter, tailing along after for want of anything better to do, sidestepped smartly a blast of hot steam. “Any progress made?”   
  
“Yes, actually. Tonnes. I think I’ve nearly got it perfected, actually. Despite the amount of time I’ve had to lend the idiot twat here. You know his is riddled with all sorts of errors? It’s as if it’s doomed to fail, in the end.”   
  
“Malfoy!”   
  
“Draco, keep to the point, please,” Snape scowled. “What is it you wish to show me?”   
  
“Huh! Fine, I will, right this moment. Besides, Potter’s failings as a mechanical engineer aside, my calculations show clearly that there will be splinching in two times out of ten during the portkey process and that must needs be rectified before there’s any thought of a practical application, sir, so—here we are. Let me show you, Godfather.”  
  
“Malfoy,” Harry interjected hotly, “I told you—I’m working on it!”   
  
“I had not made time in my schedule for the both of you, Draco,” Snape interrupted. “I was to confer only with Potter here. Please recall this is a favour I’m giving you and hop it, please. I’ve already wasted far too much time here as it is.”   
  
“Not fast enough, you’re not,” Malfoy jibed swiftly at Harry, even as he made ‘come hither’ eyebrows at their sternly obdurate supervisor. “Really, Severus,  _please_ ; you must examine mine. It’s not fair that you just see what Potter’s done. Mine’s better by far—it’s all about light, for Merlin’s sake. Something we all sorely need, every bloody night. And it’ll only take but a moment, I promise.”   
  
“I beg leave to doubt,” Harry grumbled, but he hustled up to Malfoy’s side anyway, glaring over his shoulder as his fellow student pressed buttons and pulled knobs, making ready. He jabbed a pointy finger into Malfoy’s side when the man hesitated, eyeing an oscillating gauge. “Well? Come on. Let’s see what you’ve got, Malfoy. We’re waiting.”   
  
He tapped his foot impatiently. Draco rolled his eyes, before casting a pleading cast towards their professor.   
  
“Shut it, Potter. Severus, you’ll have to venture a little closer to the machine. I have to demonstrate the arc of the magick for you to fully appreciate my findings. If you please?”   
  
“I’d rather not, thank you.” Snape pulled his robe hems away prissily. “You realize this beast is bleeding oil, Godson? And what’s this purple substance on the floor over here? Acid?”   
  
“It’s not! Really, this perfectly harmless, unlike Potter’s So, er….please, Severus? A little closer, so you can see.”   
  
Snape exhaled with a long-suffering sigh and took a graceful sideways stride to Malfoy’s side.   
  
“Very well,” he growled. “Show me. And don’t you dare be all pissy, boy, if I’m no more impressed than I am with Potter’s here. So far this morning’s been all talk and no action.”   
  
“Of course you’ll be impressed, Severus,” Draco scolded, his eyebrows up and arched, as if to lord it over Harry in the sideways glance he sent. “I guarantee it. Pinky swear, even.”   
  
Harry snorted loudly, muttering.   
  
“Don’t mind him. Just remember this device I’ve put together surpasses some silly jiggered up Portkey by miles. Mine employs eee-leck-trice-ment, too, of course.” He waved a hand at the humming, buzzing, staticky mass of the Machine, which hummed obligingly. “Only better. Much more efficient a use.”   
  
“Electricity, Malfoy,” Harry sniped, jiggling. “Say it right, if you’re so efficient. You’re the researcher…the one, incidentally, who nearly failed Muggle Studies 101 last year.”   
  
“Hmph!” Draco sneered. “Impertinence! Very well. Potter. ‘Eee-lect-ice-itty’, then. Satisfied, now?”   
  
“Not hardly.”   
  
“You!” Malfoy snarled, making as if to leave his post by the bank of whirling dials, if only for the pleasure of strangling his lab mate. “You git!”   
  
“Boys!” Snape intervened when Harry’s eyes flashed green lightning, positioning the bulk of his body between them. “Boys, I’ve absolutely no time available to watch you two squabble. Draco,” he turned to his godson—a fact Draco never let Harry forget for an instant—“Draco, what’ve you got? Demonstrate and do it quickly, please. I am already well behind schedule.”   
  
“Well…” Draco hesitated, drawing back with one final scowl Harry’s direction and tapping a wondering finger to his chin. “How do I explain, hmm? It’s...it’s this. I’m using the same basic configuration as Potter here,  _but_ , in place of the buggered up Apparate and its side effect of producing portkeys, it’s Alternatus Corpeus.”   
  
“Alternatus?’ Harry questioned, easing up so he could steal a glimpse of Malfoy’s notes. “What for, Malfoy? What manner of property are you changing? I thought it was supposed to—?”   
  
“Right, right; shut it, Potter. Look, Severus, a simple Muggle table lamp.”   
Draco hastily summoned one from the table of samples near at hand. He picked it up, turning it about so that his audience could examine the simple shade, the basic bulb and switch apparatus—the unplugged cord that dangled.   
  
“No ee-leck-trice-itty, right? No light, therefore. Doesn’t function at all, not the way it’s supposed to. And it won’t, here. So…I place it here.” He gestured and the lamp sailed away to the machine’s intake area, a metallic surface charmed to remain unchanged and spotlessly clean despite anything done on or to it. “And incant this: Alternatus Deriva!”   
  
They all paused, gazes intent, regarding the table lamp. It sat upon the platform, doing a great deal of nothing. Certainly not lighting up, as Malfoy had explained it was supposed to.  
  
“And…?” Harry stared at the lamp. It was still doing nothing. “So? What, Malfoy?”   
  
“On, damn you!” Malfoy snapped irately, addressing the stolid apparently inactive lamp and stolidly ignoring Potter. “Turn on immediately, you Muggley piece of junk! Lumos Maximus!”   
  
The lamp flickered briefly the once, then twice, and then lit up like the Eye on New Year’s Eve, brilliantly. Harry, Draco and Professor Snape immediately shielded their eyes, flinching back.   
  
“Argh!” Harry yelped, wincing. “Ever heard of subtlety, Malfoy?”   
  
“There!” Draco announced, triumphantly, focusing on his supervisor to the exclusion of all else. “It’ll work anywhere now. Even here, Professor, where the eck-tricity’s dampened by the dolmen circle above us. Is that not practical? Is that not inventive!?”   
  
“Practical, boy?” Snape riposted , turning soon the great beam of light no longer blinded him quite so directly. “What do you mean, practical? Whatever is practical about being blinded by bloody mucked up Muggle magic?”   
  
“Yeah, really, Malfoy?” Harry jumped in, glaring at his lab mate. “What’s the use of having a light source you can’t even use, it’s so bright? Or wait! Can probably use it for signaling alien spaceships, maybe.” He turned a replica of Malfoy’s sneer upon it’s maker, tapping a trainered toe.   
  
“Spaceships?’ Malfoy sneered straight back at him. “Whatever are you on about, Potter? There’s no such thing as spaceships. Or UFOs, either. It’s all been the Muggles, misinterpreting the weather. Haven’t we discussed that subject to death already? The  _point_  here is—”   
  
“There’s a point?” Harry mocked, fully turning his back on the lamp, which had begun to emit an alarming sizzle. “You actually have a practical purpose for lighting up all of Stonehenge and bloody nearly all of Wiltshire, Malfoy? Do tell. I can’t believe you—practical! Huh!”  
  
He guffawed. The Professor cleared his throat meaningfully.   
  
“Ahem. Boys.”   
  
“The point is,” Draco repeated darkly, his full attention swiveling back to a beetle-browed Snape, “is that now Wizarding folk can use one of these in place of those raggedy old sconce lights. It means we don’t have to be constrained by your damnable leckle-tricity, Potter, and we also don’t have to waste resources powering up a lumos, alright? Easy on, easy off. See?”   
  
He snapped his fingers at the lamp. Nothing happened.   
  
“…Yes?” Snape enquired, ever so politely. “Off, you said?”   
  
“Er…” Malfoy flushed scarlet, though it was hard to make it out, what with the increasing wonkiness in the lamp’s illumination. “Ah…”   
  
“Oi! What’s it doing, Malfoy?” Harry demanded. The light bulb had begun to strobe, casting the lab’s occupants in utter Stygian darkness every two seconds. “I don’t think it’s s’posed to do that…not at all”   
“Easy  _off_ , I said!” Malfoy gathered himself together and shouted, his eyeballs trolling his consternation. “Nox! Nox termina!”   
  
Harry and Snape waited patiently, but if anything the lamp only cycled more quickly, and with enough intensity Harry seriously began to fear for sunburn.   
  
“Malfoy…um?” he began tentatively. “Do you think maybe you didn’t—?”   
  
“I do not believe this is acceptable,” Snape observed, Summoning up a lady’s Chinese waxed-paper parasol, a relic of perhaps his never discussed long-dead mother. He used it adroitly to shield his frowning face from the rather intensely projected light show and continued in a tone of certain doom: “I believe you, Draco, also have some, ah… ‘kinks’… in your project yet. Thank you so much for demonstrating to me utterly nothing of worth.”   
  
“Told you so,” Harry muttered, behind the hand he was using to cover his stressed eyeballs. “Didn’t I tell you, Draco? Yes; yes, I did.”   
  
“Shut it, Harry, please—not just now, alright?” Draco growled, his startling pale—in the flashing white light—brow thunderous. “And where’s your—your little pet Creevey, for that matter then? It’s been more than the allotted ten minutes and I don’t see any French croissants here or your bloody coffees! Did he mayhap get lost, d’you think? Mislaid,  _Potter_?”   
  
“You stop, Malfoy!” Harry replied furiously. “Just—halt right there! Dennis is just—just delayed, that’s all. There was probably a line at the patisserie—you know how it happens—”   
  
“Hah! Lost! Lost, my lilywhite arse, Harry. More like he’s lost another ear, I bet!” Draco crowed, bridling. “Just like last time. Blood everywhere, there was, sir—positively disgusting. Took ages to clean up, too”  
  
“Boys….BOYS!”   
  
They sobered abruptly. Again.   
  
“That’s quite sufficient, thank you.”   
  
Blinked at Snape and promptly fell to squabbling again, Harry first and leading with a mean underhook.   
  
“Well, it’s  _your_  damned torch that’s in the way then, if he did. Can’t get through, can he? Your lamp’s fucking with his passage, that’s what. Shift it off, will you? Unless you can’t manage, Malfoy.”   
  
“Of course I can manage, you twink!” Malfoy riposted. “But I shouldn’t have to, Potter,” Malfoy stomped a heel. “It’s an automatic portkey, isn’t it, the apple you spelled? Emma being used elsewhere should have nothing to do with it, not beyond your initial incantation. That’s what all your calculations claimed it would do, leastways—though I’ve had my doubts and you know it!”  
  
“OI!” Harry stomped his heel. Snape sighed. Malfoy stuck out an accusing forefinger.   
  
“So why’s it not working, Potter? Huh? That’s what I want to know!”   
  
“Oh, piss off, Malfoy,” Harry snarled. “Dennis is fine; the croissants are fine, too! My coffee is so bloody fine I can’t wait to taste it, alright? Stop making a fuss. He’ll be along any second, never fear.”   
  
“No…you’ve lost him, Potter,” Draco nodded wisely. “That’s exactly it. Just like that time he faffed off to the Preserve in Romania and you didn’t know. You never expected that, did you? You were just damned lucky last time, that’s all. And now you’re trying to pass it off as if it as some great advancement forward in your stupid research. I don’t think so, Potter. Doesn’t fly. Does. Not. Fly.”   
  
“Hey!”   
  
“Gentlemen.” Snape huffed a little more loudly. “Or rather—you young louts.” His long thin hands settled his robes about him and he stepped backwards, towards, the door. “I’ve no time for this nonsense, not today. I’m going.”   
  
“He is too perfectly fine, arsehole, and Romania was no accident!” Harry yelled, overcome and unheeding of anything other than his opponent’s flushed cheeks and furiously glittering eyes. “I always meant to key the thing for Romania and you know it! You helped me with the coordinates, remember? What d’you mean, claiming it wasn’t meant? Ciouse it was meant—meant, meant, meant!”  
He stuck out his tongue.   
  
“Salazar preserve me,” Snape muttered. “And mayhap Dumbledore too.”   
  
“Well, it won’t,” Draco pouted, “and you know it, Potter. You mean him to go to DOM, so you could show off. The Preserve was just lucky, him landing there—and your Weasley helped you cover it up, too. Need a portkey passport, don’t you? Even for flying visits, and those gloves of yours? Illegal! Where’s your permit for those, Potter? They’ve not had customs levied, I bet.”   
  
“Oh, stuff it, Malfoy! You’re hardly better! What about the toaster? What about my eyebrows, then? Three days it took, Draco. That’s hardly a nice thing to do to your—”   
  
“Boys, I am leaving now. I suggest you, Potter—” Snape snared Harry’s rolling eyes with a steely stare, “retrieve your errant assistant in one piece, and you, pathetic excuse for a proper godson—”   
  
“Y-Yes, Severus?’ Draco faltered, suddenly the vector of Snape’s most deadly glower.   
  
“Turn off that monstrosity before the whole lab catches fire. Use Nox, Draco—simple is sometimes best. Nox.”   
  
“Oh!” Draco’s’ cheeks were red; he huffed like a Muggle fire engine. “Oh! It will  _not_ , Sev—”  
  
“Sir!” harry interjected desperately. “It’ll only be a moment more, I pro—”  
  
“Nevertheless, Draco, Harry,  _enough_. Clearly neither of you are as far along as you think you are. Regroup, compare notes, check all your calculations and make an appointment with Miss Abbott for tomorrow, nine sharp, at my Hogwarts office. We will take the time to reconsider the directions your research has been taking, boys. I have no doubt you are both lacking good sense as well as any real clue as to just why I specifically wished the two of you to work with dear Emma for your final project . Thus, we shall discuss it in every detail—please bring along your notebooks and be prepared for once.”   
  
“But! But, Professor!” Harry jumped up and down, literally, trying to get his supervisor’s attention, “you have to wait just one more moment. Dennis is due back any second now—I swear he’s alright, and he will have the croissants, no matter what arsehole here claims—he will! I’ve not mucked this up!”   
  
“You have so,” Draco snorted, turning round again. “And you know it. He’s five minutes overdue and that’s bad, Potter. Very bad. He’s gone MIA again, Harry. You know it.”   
  
“Well, you’ll simply have to retrieve him, won’t you?” Snape purred sweetly. Two pairs of angry eyes snapped back to look at him as he leant forward, just tipping his chin confidentially. “The both of you, that is. Working together, I think, because I don’t care to explain to the already bereaved Creevey family as to why yet another of their sons has been lost to Harry Potter’s antics—”  
  
“Professor!” Harry gasped. He went white, stumbling. Malfoy was instantly at his side, grabbing his waist and propping him. Glowering at his godfather as though Snape were a venomous beast.   
  
“That’s enough,” he said quietly. “Sir.”   
  
“Consider it detention.” Snape nodded, as though very pleased with himself.   
  
”Now, sir,” Draco shoved forward immediately, placing his person in between Snape’s looming dark figure and Harry’s slighter, appalled one. “No need for that sort of thing. Creevey might indeed be late returning and he might come back without all his bits but absolutely no call to single out Harry, here. Anyone could muck this up—it’s just not precisely where we wanted it yet, that’s all. Give us time—that’s all we need. A little more time.”  
  
Harry shuffled a bit, behind him, flushing, He kept his elbow in Draco’s grasp, though, never seeking to shift it.   
  
“Erm...thanks, Draco. I think.” Harry blushed harder.  
  
“It’s nothing.” Draco snorted.   
  
“Well and good. More time.”  
  
Professor Snape flushed, unbecomingly.   
  
“Fine,” he bit off. “No detention. More time, yes. Clearly you have need of it. And…perhaps that was uncalled for, Potter, but still—”  
  
“Still?” Harry echoed, anxiously. “Professor Snape, this really does work. Will work, I mean. Please just trust me.”  
  
“Yes, yes,” Snape shook off Harry’s impulsive hand on his sleeve. “Be that as it may, Potter, you need to return your assistant in one piece and soonest. Decent assistants do not litter the ground, gentleman, and you’d do better to treat the little Creevey whelp with more care than you have. Devoted he may be, and almost indecently eager, but still…hop to it, then.”  
  
“Fine! Sir, yes sir,” Draco came to mock attention, heels clicking. “On it, sir—aren’t we, Potter?”   
  
He elbowed Harry and hissed at him—“Stop gawping and say yes, idiot!”—before Snape could utter another reproving word.   
  
“Oh—yeah,” Harry mumbled, unconsciously shifting so that he was practically obscured by Draco’s brilliantly white robes. “Surely, Professor. We’ll find him. And, um. Er…sorry. I didn’t  _mean_  to lose Dennis again; it just happens sometimes—he goes off half-cocked, no matter what I say—”   
  
“Hsst,” Draco poked him sharply. “Quiet now, Potter, while you’re still marginally ahead of the game. No need to give my godfather any more info—”   
  
“But I only wanted to tell—”  
  
“Very well,” Snape nodded sharply, overriding Harry. He pinned Draco with a long stare, meaningfully.   
“We’ll give it five additional minutes and then I’ll leave any rescue mission in your good hands, godson. Don’t muck it up or  _you’ll_  be the ones popping off to Creevey’s, mind, explaining. And I don’t think they’ll be wanting to hear anything from  _you_ , Draco, specifically. Not exactly politic.”   
Draco flushed beet-red; twinned high spots of colour rising on his sharp pale cheekbones. The machine burbled darkly behind them, a forbidding mass of wires, coils, tubes and brassbound fittings.   
  
“It’s not his problem, sir,” Harry burst a few steps forward. “He’d nothing to do with Dennis going. It’s my problem and I’ll take the blame, sir, if anything should hap—”  
  
“Yes, Godfather, we’ll be sure to—” Draco’s imperious voice overrode him. “Of course we will. We’re already abreast of it. I just sent a Point Me for him. He’s in Torquay, actually—unharmed.”   
  
“Oh… good-oh,” Harry sighed. Leaned up against his partner. “Thanks, mate.”  
  
“It’s nothing, idiot. You’d do the same, I’m sure,” Draco muttered out of the side of his mouth. “Godfather, as I was saying, we’ll—”   
  
“Then…good day. Make sure to make an appointment with my gryphon, mind,” Snape barked, and Disapparated suddenly.   
  
“—not let you down.” Draco trailed off dispiritedly, glancing over his shoulder at the table lamp when the thing suddenly stuttered into a series of frighteningly loud pops. “Oh! Fuck! Harry, look! Not again!”  
  
“Bother.”   
  
“Harry. Harry! Look there! See my bloody lumos? Look what it’s doing now!”   
  
The bulb was smoking at the socket and a faint sparkling purple haze was beginning to obscure the farther reaches of their shared lab.   
  
“Eh?’   
  
“ _Fuck_ , Harry! Help me with that thing, will you? Before it blows us all to smithereens! Merlin’s bloody balls, Harry! Finite, you blasted thing! Finite Incantatum!”   
  
“Wha-where?”   
  
Harry spun to face the enormous pile of springs and cogs, now shaking madly, and nearly staggered under an almost palpable blast of sheer light energy. The Always On had sprung a leak or something. It was very much Always On.  
  
“Fuck!” he exclaimed. “It _is_! Fucking, bloody— _Finite_!”   
  
“Finite!” Draco shrieked, waving his wand wildly. “Oh shit, oh Merlin’s baggy boxers!  **Finite** , damn it!”   
  
“Oi! Ouch! Freaking—schmeaking—gribbit! It burrrrrns!”   
  
Their assistant Apparating suddenly into the scene, clutching a box of slightly smashed French pastry, a coffee, a tea, and what looked to be a freely bleeding thumb, wrapped up separately in waxed paper, was regarded as highly unwelcome.   
  
“Ooohhh…” Creevey moaned, staggering about in the smokey haze. “Where izzat? Harry? Harry, where are you? I’m…back…Harry…”  
  
He subsided into a paroxysm of coughing.   
  
“Where the hell—oh, why now?” Draco growled. “Why ever now must he show his face, right in the midst of a bloody explosion. Potter! Potter, get Creevey out of the way, damn it! He’ll be killed otherwise!”   
  
“Dennis!” Harry shouted, darting forward, “Dennis, come over here! Get out of that, will you?”   
  
“Ow!” Creevey shouted, spinning in ever-smaller circles. He looked about to topple over. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Bloody apple!”   
  
“Dennis? Dennis, I’ve got you—come on, now. This way!” Harry peered carefully through the smoke billowing from the lamp, grabbing at what he was fairly sure was his somewhat damaged assistant. “Dennis—speak to me, mate! You alright?”  
  
To one side of them, Malfoy was shouting ‘FINITE!’ at the top of his lungs and pointing his wand at Emma like a conductor.   
  
“This way, Dennis,” Harry urged, drawing the younger lad a careful distance to safety. “That’s it—this way, now. Here. I’ll take the coffee—”  
  
“For fuck’s sake, Harry—keep casting Finite!” Draco howled, dancing about the perimeter of the unhappy machine. “Don’t stop now! It’s out only chance! Worry over the little Creevey later! And move  _your_  bleeding arse out of the way—now you’re the one blocking me!”   
  
Dennis chose that moment to fall over in a heap, tepid beverages and pasty crumbs spattering everywhere.   
  
“Hey!” Harry ducked to grab him before he cracked his head open on the floor. “Hey, hey, damn it! Dennis. Dennis?!”   
  
“Oh, hey, Harry?” Dennis perked up considerably at the sight of Harry. He shrugged off his confusion like a tattered cloak, apparently attempting to be suave even as he swayed in place, sloshing the coffee he clutched. He seemed completely unaware of the machine pulsing ominously behind him, the light bulb throbbing in crackling menace. “Is that you? I brought your coffee, Harry.”   
  
“Potter!” Malfoy suddenly shouted, leaping toward the both of them. “Potter, move it! Fuck this shite, Potter. Both of you—get down, now!”   
  
“Harry.” Creevey was deathly pale, almost a green shade, and looked much the worse for wear, his coat torn and frayed, his trousers sagging. He blinked, oblivious to Harry’s wide worried eyes and his other bosses’ shrieks of ‘Finite!’ in the background. “Sir? Er…did something happen, while I was gone? What’s up? Where’s the fire?”   
  
“Behind you!  _Duck_ , you bloody morons!” Draco shrieked, tackling them both in a giant leap, so that all three rolled out of the way just in time to avoid the arcing dazzle of a high-powered, electromagnetically altered Lumos exploding. “Get the hell down! Look out! She’s going to blow! No—she’s blowing!”   
  
And thar ‘she’ did, too.  
  
 _Boom_!


	3. Chapter 3

_**“…although the discovery of the usefulness of a high intensity lumos calibration was largely fortuitous, it soon became clear that an altered-states portkey would be greatly enhanced in function if such an ancillary device was included to measure the expected output in a number of ways, such as wattage and temperature….”  
  
~Extract from the preliminary draft joint Dissertation submission of D. Malfoy and H. Potter, Flamel U. 2002. **  
  
  
University of Flamel, Graduate Dorm Tower, South, Room 4-A, later that same day. _  
  
  
“Bad day,” Draco sighed later, sagging into Harry and pressing them both into the down mattress he’d had brought over from the Manor. “Lousy, awful, screwed up day.”  
  
It had taken literally hours to clean the lab and deal with Creevey’s patching up at St. Mungo’s. And their patching up, which was painful but thankfully minor. And then there’d been the late-evening meeting with the Head, who was appalled and verbal about it. And then, topping it all, the Howler from Snape. “Baaaad. Fucking. Day. Yeah?”   
  
“Shit day,” Harry agreed. “Shit like jarvey turds on toast shit.” Snape had treated him to a blistering firecall after, and the scrape of his acidulous tongue had left Harry’s every nerve jangling. “I bloody well could kill him sometimes.”  
  
“Mmh,” Draco grunted agreeably.   
  
Harry dropped a soft kiss on Draco’s shoulder for self-comfort, snuggling into a wealth of hard muscle and the gorgeously contrasting smooth warm hollow located beneath his compatriot’s chin.   
  
“Wanna shag, then?” he mumbled hopefully, though he knew for fact his partner was just as worn out as he. “Shagging’s good for what ails you. Or me, case in point. I need some sexual healing, Draco. Gimme.”   
  
“Ergh—how awful a simile, Potter. Jarvy turds indeed. On shit toast. Yuck.”   
  
“Love you.”   
  
“Yes, well…”  
  
Draco winced; Harry could feel the tendrils of his hair moving as his lover wrinkled his forehead into it. They’d become a Harry-Draco pretzel, what with the shifting legs and hands and insidious nuzzling each of them were doing. Then the contrary git paused, going still against Harry, his length a pleasant weight upon Harry’s lax thigh.   
  
“Love you, too. Um…shag, hmm? That’s your solution for everything, isn’t it, Potter?” There was that familiar chuckle, the one Harry couldn’t help but return, most times. Harry’s back was rubbed—two swift sweeps, up and down—and he curled instantly into the touch. “But, yeah, okay.”   
  
“Nh.” Harry grunted. “Or, maybe….juss’ maybe….” He was comfortable and moving sounded almost more effort than it was worth. “Sleep…” he muttered, after a moment, thinking past the potential shagging. How nice it would be to simply wake up on the morrow, with a fresh day before him, and poor Dennis Creevey, the accident prone little twit all healed up and hopefully with all limbs intact and ready for work. “Sleep?”   
  
“..No sleep, Harry.”   
  
Malfoy rolled over in his bed, which they’d transfigured ages ago to be even wider than it had been when he’d slept in his old bedroom at the Manor. The dorm room was small but cosy, populated with two of everything—desks, chairs, lamps, bookcases and beds. Draco had brought his marvellous expanding armoire from home so there was plenty of storage. He took a wriggling Harry with him, arranging him over his person like a Harry-blanket.   
  
“Your fault, you brought it up. Wanna shag now, definitely. Only solution.”   
  
His partner stirred. Draco-bits poked at him, pressing into his stomach—and his were determinedly begging for attention, despite the lure of Morpheus. Why was it minor injuries were so tiring, after?  
  
“Come here, then.” Harry gave in; kissed his way down the length and breadth of Draco’s scarred chest, taking his time over it. He tongued a nipple tantalizingly. “Let me touch you.”   
  
“Um…’kay.” Draco did, but then fell into a state of abstraction. “Still. Point, you have one. Annoying old bastard, Sev is. Can be a pain.”   
  
“Um.” Harry was abstracted, too, but not by the thought of Snape, Mentor of Meanness. “Do tell, mate. Like I didn’t know that.”   
  
“Don’t like the way he pops up, just as we’re not ready for him. Wasn’t he supposed to come Tuesday, Potter? I thought it was Tuesday next. Was on my calendar as Tuesday next, at least.”   
  
“Um-hum,” Harry hummed, lipping Draco’s navel. “Yep. Was. The wanker.”   
  
“Not prepared, fully, not for him, at least—hate that when it happens. Not fair. Would rather it were Old Gidgitt calling.”   
  
“Nnnn-no.” Harry nodded. Old Gidgett was a known quantity, being the graduate students liaison with the greater college. He, at least, could be handled. “Or Brangle. Can manage Brangle.” Harry pursed his lips discontentedly and planted a mocking little kiss right upon the crown of Draco’s half-hard willy. “Mmm, ahh. Forget them...forget  _him_ , Draco. You taste good.”   
  
“Silly arse,” Draco petted the tumbled hair fondly. “Of course I do. Suck it, then, if you’re going to.”   
  
“Will.” Harry began, laving the pinkening rod of flesh slowly, his eyelids droopy. His lover was decidedly warm to the touch, something he luxuriated in whenever they came into contact. This time it was lulling, despite the increasing pressure in his own groin. Luxurious in its lulling, like a hot bath after a chill day. “Will.”   
  
“Good,” Draco swallowed, arching. His legs shifted restlessly. “Ah! There, Harry—oh! Nice…oh, just like that. Like it’s a lolly.”   
  
“Um-hmmm…” Harry bobbed his chin in agreement, dutifully sucking hard. “Meh-guh?” he asked, trying to make himself understood despite the cock clogging his throat. “’Aaayk-o?”   
  
“Like that! Just—just like that!” Draco gasped, spreading his legs wide to allow Harry more room. Harry’s cheeks hollowed from the suction he was exerting. When he peeped up from under his nearly closed lashes he could see that Draco watched him, grey eyes brilliant with anticipation. “…And a little deeper, Potter,” his lover urged. He grinned, swift and passing, a brilliant ray flashing. “You know you suck like a girl, Harry? Stop playing with me. Got to put your back into it.”   
  
“Gngnph!” Harry snarled; he couldn’t help it. He was under the impression Malfoy was pretty damned pleased, just as it was. “’—uuck-orff!” He brushed his teeth ever so lightly against the bulbous swell of Draco’s cockhead, teasing—and not completely pleasantly either.   
  
“Oh!” Draco breathed. “Oh—I take it back, Potter--there you go, there you go—ahh! Mmm, yessss, Harry!”  
  
Harry started swallowing in earnest. He adored the look on that face when Draco let go. He wanted to see more of it. Draco obliged, writhing even as his long fingers clutched at the sheets.   
  
“ Oh, now! Harder, deeper— _faster_ , Harry! Gonna come! Gonna come—gonna come—come! Arrr—eeeesssh!”   
  
“N’ugh!”   
  
“Urgh…ummm…That’s it!” Malfoy mumbled weakly, thighs twitching between Harry’s hands, cringing back into the mattress as the room swirled with white dots and his hearing sizzled like the static from their great machine in the lab. “Yessss. Just…like…that…ooooh, Harry.”   
  
Draco ceased his running commentary abruptly, his eyes rolling back into his head as Harry swallowed.   
One. Last. Time. All at once, like a python. Gulped it all down with a satisfied smirk. Drew off abruptly, with a little pop, the vertebrae in his neck cracking with the suddenness of it.   
  
“There, now,” he croaked, examining his handiwork: a limp Malfoy, pale and placid and entirely shagged-out. Speechless. “…Happy, Malfoy?”   
  
Draco seemed completely unable to reply.  
  
“Nhgh!” Harry coughed feebly, licking his lips as he raised his chin with a daft grin. It was difficult to be all suave and manly when one’s esophagus was still twitching, shrinking back to its proper size. “Phooey!” Harry swore, trying to lick the residue of salty come off his own tongue and rid himself of dry mouth.   
  
For his part, Draco became marginally aware of sticky hot wet spreading all over his lower thighs; his lover was whinging nasally as he snort-swallowed remnants, but not in a bad way. He blinked at the coffered ceiling, quietly enjoying the carven oak squares swimming over them.  
  
“Faugh! Gods, but you do spew a lot out, Malfoy! Look at me, would you? I’m soaked!”   
  
Draco smiled sweetly at the ceiling, and beneficently at the sky he knew rose high above it, soaring over Flamel’s crenellations unseen. He gripped Harry’s hair a little tighter within his cramped knuckles.  
  
“Mhh.” A single finger lifted, somehow managing to indicate the state of Harry’s cock, limp and damp between Draco’s calf and the sheets. The state of Harry, sated by hand and careless frotting alone.   
  
“…’ext ‘ime…” he murmured, making the effort to force his smiling lips to make syllables. “Next…time.”   
  
“What?” The question was sleepy. So was Draco’s Harry, sprawled out half over him and hogging three of the four pillows.   
  
“Next time, Potter,” Draco whispered, breathless yet but smirking, “next time that goes  _in_ me, alright? Finesse your aim, damn it. Remember, anything _I_  can do, you can do, too.”   
  
“Bleeder!” Harry growled ferociously as he reared up, jolted out of his stupor….but he was nonetheless grinning to beat the band, brilliantly wide and somewhat smeary still with pearlescent leftovers. Draco smiled back at him, enjoying the look of newly shagged Potter.   
  
“Sod you, Malfoy.”   
  
Harry shoved the back of his hand over his reddened face, partially and haphazardly removing most of them. Pressed a kiss to Draco’s navel even as he grumbled into it, the smear of come reapplied by transfer. “Telling  _me_ where to put it! I’ll show you where to put it, poncey twat.”   
  
Grey eyes glittered under half-lowered lids.   
  
“Now we get to it, Potter,” Malfoy essayed the baby brother of his usual sneer. The  _cute_  baby brother. “Trial and error, that’s the way. Knew you weren’t as thick as you make out.”   
  
“I so—” Harry used his elbows and kneecaps to scramble up the bed, not stopping till his face was but a bare inch from Malfoy’s. He glowered, pressing their foreheads together so hard, it was nearly painful. “Hate you, Malfoy.”   
  
“…mmm-hmmm,” Draco’s answering nod of acceptance was lost in the mechanics of the kiss that followed. “Sure you do—mmmph!….”   
  
  


 


	4. Chapter 4

_**“The foci of the altered states portkey is established in this routine:  
A final arrival point is derived and the simple incantation cast, just as with a regular portkey. A high intensity lumos is attached.   
  
Working backwards, the next previous location in the chain (logically, the actual transitory location or goal, i.e., one of the parallel planes of existence, hypothetically) is incorporated into the next simple portkey incantation and literally overlaid above the last. A high intensity lumos is again attached to the overlay and the first level is established and recorded in rune... “  
  
~Extract from the preliminary draft joint Dissertation submission of D. Malfoy and H. Potter, Flamel U. 2002. **  
  
Hogwarts School, Headmaster’s Office, several days after the failed demonstration of Misters Potter and Malfoy’s individual discoveries and the Highly Unfortunate Incident, as it was termed when written up in their respective student files. _  
  
  
“But, sir! That’s not fair!”   
  
“It really isn’t, Severus,” Draco jumped in, smarmily. He flapped a hand at the heap of bound folio displayed prominently on Snape’s desk. It contained all of Potter’s work thus far. “Starting all over, just because of few unimportant body parts a little mangled? And, really, it’s not as though Creevey’s missing anything _crucial_ —they put it all back at St. Mungo’s.“  
  
“Draco.” Their overseer’s eyebrows beetled as he swung his gaunt features to stare his godson down. “Stay well clear of this. This is Potter’s to fix up, and not your problem.  _Your_  problem— _you,_ Draco—of the two of you idiots—actually appear to have come up with a practical application, of sorts. Though really I can’t begin to understand how, but…Potter’s is just too.” He gestured sharply, the scowl even more pronounced by fleeting temper. “…Too  _Wild_. Not reliable. And I expected better of you than that, Potter. I did.”   
  
“Sir!”   
  
He stared at Harry, black eyes stern. Harry jumped up from his seat, fists automatically clenching. For perhaps the third time during the interview.   
  
“It  _is_  reliable, sir—that’s the thing!” Harry insisted, diving right back in with unaltered vigour. “I’ve replicated the result dozens of times, Professor! I can prove it, too—there’s reams and reams of data I’ve collected, these last two months. And!” he halted, waving an arm toward his lab partner. “And Malfoy here can corroborate all of it, sir! You know that; you just have to actually  _read_  the Appendices.”   
  
“No, no,” Snape waved a dismissing hand. “I have read them; it’s my job to, isn’t it? But that’s still not the actual point, Potter.”   
  
“Well?” Harry shrugged theatrically, his hands fluttering wide. He rolled his eyes. “What is, then, Professor?”   
  
“Ahem.” Snape waved Harry back into his chair, a snap of his fingers bringing the seat smack into the back of Harry’s kneecaps, forcing him there. Harry sat with a plop. “The point, Potter, is that  _you’re_  missing the point of this exercise—indeed, of the whole entire experiment.”  
  
“How so?” Harry shot back, leaning forward. “I don’t follow, sir.”   
  
“Potter…maybe you should—” Malfoy began softly, making meaningful eyes sideways at his coworker, but both Snape and Harry waved him off, intent upon each other.   
  
“Potter, Portkeys are easily made,” Snape went on, superbly undisturbed by Malfoy’s glaring at first one of them and then the other. “We’ve no need of a great hulking machine to make them for us. And especially not one that is prone to constant malfunction.”   
  
“It is  _not_ , sir! That was just a few—solitary—instances—!”  
  
“Salazar!” Malfoy muttered bleakly, dropping his pale forehead into his cupped hands. “Now’s not the time, Potter.”   
  
“The fact remains, Potter, you could damage a great many more important people than just Creevey, understand?” Snape bent forward, his robes of office settling about his person as he did so, a great black cape of authority incarnate. “This is sloppy work; even you have the grace to admit it, I should hope.”   
  
“Um…well,” Harry gulped, glancing away. “Could use some adjustment; I’ll five you that, sir,” he admitted, pink-cheeked.   
  
“Fact, Potter, is this: I‘ll not have you presenting it to the Governors as it is. ‘Tis much too dangerous. Refine it, Potter. Redirect it, better yet. There must be some use you can put that beastly Transporter to—a practical application that we’ll all benefit from. And you can’t think of one, perhaps my godson here can.”  
  
“It’s not a Transporter, Professor,” Harry replied sulkily, glaring at the cracked, aged flags the scattered jewel-toned rugs didn’t quite cover. “Leastways, not solely. It merely concentrates magic and renders some incantations automatic. And I’d never hurt people knowingly, sir. You know that.”   
  
“Pfft!” Snape snorted. “Really, now?”   
  
“ _Really_ , Severus—it  _is_ Potter you’re speaking to, here,” Draco intervened swiftly, nodding away as if he were presenting a theory all in the room accepted as absolute. “He’s a fluffy bunny. A Kneazle kitten, more like. Not about to let  _anyone_  be hurt. So, erm, Severus, do go easy on the little runt—he’s bloody sensitive with it.”  
  
“Harrumph!” Professor Snape was all at once flushed and unsettled. “I would ask you didn’t being your personal lives into this, Draco! Decorum, please.”   
  
“Draco!”   
  
“Hush, Harry. And that’s not what I mean, for Merlin’s sake. Can’t you see I’m defending you?”   
  
“Do desist,” Snape advised dryly. “It is entirely unnecessary.”   
  
“Well!” Harry huffed, twisting in his chair to face his lab mate. “The nerve! Well, stop it then—stop it right now, Draco! I don’t need defense for what’s perfectly reasonable! It’s plain as day I’m on the right track here—and I am hardly anyone’s pet!”   
  
“It’s  _not_  unreasonable, Potter,” Snape doggedly stepped in, his voice snapping Harry’s attention back to settle on him. “To extrapolate that your screwy Portkey might harm an unsuspecting innocent, whether you will it to or no. Not all magic that destroys is Dark, as well we all know.”   
  
Draco harrumphed on the sidelines, possibly in agreement with his godfather, possibly because he felt his point about Potter was entirely valid—Potter was mostly harmless. Mostly. Snape and Potter, however, glared heartily at one another, not heeding.   
  
“I know, sir, but you  _must_  under—”   
  
“But,  _listen_  to me, Potter,” The Professor raised his voice, just a wee bit. “Listen and listen well, please. I  _am_  your advisor; do provide me the courtesy before you go prancing off on yet another tangential diatribe. That dreary item aside, neither are you…This I do know. However….however.”  
Snape heaved a sigh, a heavy one, which dragged the furrows in his cheeks into something resembling a basset hound’s.   
  
“There may be some merit—just an nth of it, Potter, a smidgeon; nothing sufficiently satisfactory for graduation credit, mind…but some…small… _very_ minor amount of….”  
  
“Professor?” A puzzled Harry leant forward. “Professor, what are thinking of?”   
  
“Yes. What  _are_  you, Godfather?” Draco, too, was intrigued.   
  
“Yes, very well. I do know, Potter, you mean well. You likely honestly believe this—this permutation of a perfectly normal Portkey will be the next best thing since pre-sliced Flobberworm in tins. Which they are not at all, really, and there’s neither here nor there.”   
  
“Sir?”   
  
Snape resettled his robes, fingering them thoughtfully. “But consider this, do. If I, as your supervisor, am having doubts, do you really think the Board will let it go that easily? Do you?”   
  
“Honestly, sir,” Harry wriggled on his chair, “It’s not that—I just need more—”  
  
“Then, what is it, Potter?” Snape demanded, leaning forward over the reams piled haphazardly upon his messy desk. “What’s driving you down this road, in particular? Whatever has compelled you to pursue this line of research, of all things? I just don’t see it—now how it pertains.”   
  
Potter ceased all movement, going still as stone. The lack drew Malfoy’s attention to him and only him.   
  
“It’s Sirius, sir.”   
  
“What?!” Snape was visibly startled. Draco more so.  
  
“Whaaat, Harry?!” He whipped his head about to stare appalled at his fellow graduate student. “I thought you’d dropped that? I thought you were over it! What in the bloody fucking fuck d’you  _mean_ , ‘it’s Sirius’, Harry?”   
  
“Preposterous, Potter! There’s no connection—”  
  
No, sir! There is! There….really, truly, sir…is.”  
  
Harry disregarded the fuss of his fellows. Instead, he sprang out of his chair and again took up a spate of fast pacing, careening smartly about the crowded spaces of Snape’s office.   
  
“It’s like this, see?”  
  
“Like  _what_ , Potter? Explain yourself!”   
  
“If—and this is a big ‘if’, I admit—if I can send a portkey through the Veil, then Sirius can grab it, alright? He can come back from wherever he is—”  
  
“Excuse me?!” Snape was appalled—horrified.   
  
“Harry! Harry, stop with this, damn it!” Draco was also standing, a hand out to catch at Harry’s elbow as he rushed passed. He missed, though.   
  
“Remember, sir? Remember that everyone at DOM said they didn’t think he was really dead, right? It’s all thin the Order’s reports, Professor: ‘Sirius Black, active status suspended’. So it stands to reason he can still come back—alive and in one piece. He just needs a safe way to do so—and that’s  _my_ idea!”   
  
“…What? What, what, what?” Snape repeated the one word, stunned, as if echoing a broken Muggle record. “No! Not hardly! You  _cannot_  possibly be thinking that something as simple as that could ever work, Potter. You can’t  _possibly_ —”  
  
“But it’s because it  _is_  simple, Professor,” Harry returned instantly, coming to a halt before the Professor’s majestic desk. He slammed the flat of his hand down upon, sending a sheaf of parchment flying hither and yon. “And because it is that simple, it’ll work, I just know it. You have to match like to like, Professor. The Veil’s not that mysterious—it’s a portal, a doorway, and he’s just only on the other side of it, within easy reach. I just needed a key, don’t you see that?”   
  
“Potter!”   
  
“Oh! For gods sake Harry,” Draco moaned, closing his eyes briefly. “Really, you must—”  
  
“Shut it, Draco—you know I’m onto something here—something big! It’s only that I needed a way to let him know, that’s all, and then we’re in business. And that’s solved, now. It’s automatic—just like a Muggle light switch. Magic on, magic off, y’see?”   
  
“No!” Snape had also risen; he glowered fiercely from his stance, framed by an arching window lintel. “No, I do not see at all, Harry! What foolishness is this?”   
  
“Sir! Sir, listen to me—it’s not foolish, alright? It’s got data to support it. Draco’s even done most of the more difficult calculations for me—”  
  
“You tricked me, you little sly bastard!” Draco roared, surging forward. Harry ducked the hand that reached for his collar just in time. “You fucking well misled me!  _Me_!”   
  
“No!” Potter shouted. “No, I  _didn’t_ , Draco.  _You_  just didn’t listen— _you_  didn’t want to, did you? Remember? Because I told you, flat out—”  
  
“Harry!”  
  
“But—but—you  _must_  listen to me now, don’t you? We’re on the bloody verge of something great here—something amazing! All I have left to do is send the portkey through using the machine’s Apparate setting, it’ll be preset to return him instantly. No fuss—no bother. Nothing simpler than that. Don’t you follow?”   
  
“ _I_  don’t follow, Harry.” Draco announced firmly. “ _I_  do not. We’ve discussed this. More than, we’ve beaten the subject to death. There’s no data—nothing but a bunch of fouled up numbers, none of them adding up. There’s nothing to calculate, no vectors in the Veil, Harry. It literally— _simply_ —can’t be done,” he snarled.   
  
“That’s not true, Draco! Not fucking true!”  
  
“The hell it isn’t, Harry!” Draco shouted back, stepping up so they were nose-to-nose before Snape’s desk. The air currents in the room rumbled ominously, reflecting the waves of anger, uncertainty and conviction pouring like sweat off the two furious Wizards. “Beyond the Veil is entirely unknown; you can’t rely on him being there—you can’t rely on  _any_  of the three thousand and five other variables that would play into it, even if there was any reasonable way to apply your damned crackpot theory! There’s nothing ‘simple’ about it at all, simpleton! Other than the fact that it just. Won’t. Work!”   
  
“Hmm…” Snape tapped a long stained finger to his chin, staring off into the middle distance as if his office were its usual peace-drenched self and two young men weren’t having a knock-down-drag-out directly before him. “Hm. I…wonder.”   
  
“That’s doesn’t matter! It’s worth a bloody try, isn’t it?” Harry demanded, abruptly facing away from Draco with a huff. He shoved himself forward, further mussing the surface of the shiny desk and tapped hard upon his advisor’s robed shoulder. “And  _you_  need to let me, Snape. Severus, I mean— _please_! For Sirius’s sake, if for nothing else, you need to let me. I have to try—I have to!”   
  
“Mmmm…” Snape quirked his brows at nothing much, his gaze distant and unseeing. Draco wasn’t sure if he was hearing Harry at all. But  _he_  was—and he’d enough of this ‘rescuing Sirius’ nonsense. His cousin Black was long dead and long gone and the Veil was impenetrable—everyone knew that. Harry was messing with things that shouldn’t be messed with and likely to get hurt because of it.   
  
He wouldn’t see Harry hurt. Not again—not by this.   
  
“I won’t have it,” he said, and folded his arms across the front of his lab coat with determination. “I. Will. Not. Have. It. Potter. No matter what Severus says, I won’t let you.”   
  
“It’s not your call, Draco! Butt out!” Harry spun on a heel to snarl. He shrugged, pulling himself up short, mercurial in his passion. “You _knew_  where I was going with this—Merlin, you’ve even helped me! You might not have wanted to admit you know, but you certainly not a chowderhead, Draco! You knew—don’t deny it! So, why would think I wouldn’t follow through, Draco? I don’t see what the problem is, damn it! It’s all right there—in my notes—in my reports! Let me do this, the two of you. I—”  
  
“What, Harry?” Draco sneered, rearing back, rocking on his heels. “What?” he snapped. “You need my help, is that it?”   
  
“Well….yes, Draco,” Harry whispered. “I…rather thought you knew that already. I…thought you’d given it?”   
  
“Hah! Bah, Potter!” Draco turned his back, breathing hard and fast through his nostrils. “We’ll see about that—we’ll just see, won’t we? It’ll be a cold day in Hades when I—”  
  
“The problem, eh?” Snape stated quietly, returning with a start from wherever he’d been visiting, mentally. And incidentally drawing both other Wizards round sharply to focus upon his tetchy face. “The problem, is it? As I see it, there’s many a problem with your theory, Potter, not the least of which is damage to the machine—and to you—and to _Black_ , should he still be in any shape to be damaged. This is an entirely foolish endeavour, what you’re suggesting. I’ll need to see all of your research, immediately. Every last scrap.”   
  
“What?” Draco was shocked—again. His eyes were wide as saucers as he stared at his godfather, open-mouthed. “No, Severus! You can’t mean you’re actually considering letting Potter proceed with this?”   
  
“I can indeed mean that, Draco,” Snape nodded ponderously. He stood with a slow movement, deliberately meeting each of his pupils’ eyes in turn. Swung away abruptly to stride to the window that provided his desk with a view of the Pitch. “I do mean it. This is an institute of learning—a hallowed one, with a long history. You are attending the same, at Flamel. And learning implies succinctly that at times a student learns from his or her errors as well as his or her successes. This is madness—yes. It’s foolish and likely doomed to ignominious failure. Yes.”   
  
“Well, yes, Severus!” Draco was not to be shunted aside. “I should think you’d see that, even if Harry here doesn’t—”  
  
“Shut it, Draco!” Harry thrust an elbow out, catching his partner in the ribs hard and sharp. “Let Severus finish, by god! This is important!”   
  
“Still,” Snape’s voice was very soft, almost inaudible except that the acoustics of the glassed panes reflected it back to the two young men listening intently. “Still. It’s worth a chance. And a chance we shall give it.”   
  
“Tha-thank you, Severus!” Harry was bouncing from foot to foot. His green eyes alight with eagerness. “Thank you!”   
  
“Bloody hell!” Draco swore, next to him. “Bloody _effing_  hell!  _What_? Now there’s  _two of you run mad?”_    
  



	5. Chapter 5

_**“The lumos is threefold in importance, primarily as a catalytic trigger and a foci for the observing (presumably incanting) Wizard. It also tells the Wizard whether the EMMM (Emma) has instilled sufficient power in the portkey for the transportation to be effective overall. Like a litmus test, as used by Muggles, or an LED light to indicate whether a Muggle battery is at 100%, the high intensity lumos is. It is also more effective because it is so very bright; a lesser light wouldn’t do ...”  
  
~Extract from the preliminary draft joint Dissertation submission of D. Malfoy and H. Potter, Flamel U. 2002. **  
  
  
Flamel University, two weeks later. Observatory Platform, Orrery Tower. Late morning._  
  
  
“I don’t like the way this is going, Harry.”   
  
“Neither do I.”  
  
Draco tapped his sheaf of scribbled-over parchment with a hangnail—and then promptly chewed it off.   
  
“Nrngh-ngh-nnn. There.” He inspected his bloody finger. “I don’t care for it at all.”   
  
“Yes, alright.” Harry swung his heels, kicking at the stones of the narrow gap between crenellations they were seated within, practically atop one another. The breeze from high up scurried past, ruffling his fringe. He blinked at the light gleaming brilliantly across his spectacles and stared off into the distance, adamant as the stone. “We know that. You’ve said that. Shut it already—it’s going the way it’s going. Deal.”   
  
“…I don’t like it.”   
  
“Yes.”   
  
“You know why?”   
  
“Yes.”   
  
“I’ll tell you, then.”   
  
“Please don’t.”   
  
“If there’s one little error—one eensy, teensy, tiny error, Harry—Creevey’s Splinched beyond repair and we are fucked forever. Fucked, fucked, fucked and not in a good way. There’s no margin.”   
  
“I know.”   
  
“It’s a huge risk.”   
  
“Yep.”   
  
“I hate it when you do that,” Draco remarked. He grabbed at Harry’s kneecap to make him stop. “You’ll tip us over.”   
  
“No, I won’t.”   
  
“Will. And we  _can’t_ do this, Harry. Can  _not_. Snape’ll freak. It won’t get by  _him_ , not if  _I_  found it so easily. It’s too much. And it’s…. It’s.” He ceased speaking; looking a bit pole-axed.  
  
“It’s?” Harry prompted. He snuggled into his partner’s side, tucking the hand closest into Draco’s white lab robe. “What’s  _it_?”   
  
“Not…ethical, Harry. You can’t. You mustn’t, rather. Creevey might be willing—Merlin knows why—” He rolled his eyes. “But you can’t let him. Cancel that— _I_  won’t let you let him.”   
  
“We could fix it.” Harry shrugged. “And I’ll go next.”  
  
“No!” Draco turned wild grey eyes at him. “Absolutely not! And—it can’t be fixed. Not so easily, Harry.”   
  
“It can!” Harry twisted about, staring upwards, all his energy going into the protest. “ _You_  can, Draco—if you just try. Use your thing-gummy, the—the—”  
  
“’Always-On’? That what you mean, Harry?” Draco regarded his lab mate with a skeptical eye, settling down again when Harry didn’t press the issue of being the next guinea pig. “I fail to see what casting perpetual light on the subject will do for us, Harry. Explain your thinking.”   
  
“It’s!” Harry scrambled about even more, clinging to the jutting rock with one hand and Draco’s shoulder blade with the other; swinging a leg and half his trim young body out in mid-air, heedless of the drop, and managing finally to straddle his mate’s lap. “It’s like this! It’s not the light part I’m talking about, Draco, it’s!” he huffed, from his new position. “ _Listen_  to me now—”  
  
“ _ **Fuck**_ , Harry! Don’t.  _Do_. That!” Draco was instantly hot-wired again, clutching at every part of his partner’s person. “Merlin,  **fuck**!”  
  
“Draco—”  
  
He was clearly was horrified. So horrified his fingers dug deep into Harry’s upper arms and his waist, imprinting.   
  
“Draco, it’s alright—”  
  
“Salazar’s dick, Harry—that was dangerous!”   
  
“Um.” Harry ducked his chin, looked mutinous. Peeped up from under his lashes. “Er. I made it, didn’t I? Get over that bit for now, Draco—we have more important things to think about.”   
  
“Falling to your death _is_  important, Harry,” Draco shot back, pale as snow in the glittering light. “Dying after all you’ve been through—of something totally stupid, mind you!—is very important! Don’t fuck around. Not up here. Promise me.”   
  
“Right, sorry.” Harry brought his head close by Draco’s leaning their foreheads together. The rims of his specs got in the way but neither complained. “I  _am_  sorry—wasn’t thinking.”   
  
“Please think next time. And don’t fuck with Emma either.”   
  
“Yes, alright—I promise, but—”  
  
“No buts.” Draco kissed his cheek, softly, his narrow nose rubbing and poking. Harry sighed and let the lips distract for a moment—but only a moment. He fidgeted, parting his lips. Draco promptly stopped them, muttering. “I won’t tolerate losing you, Harry.”  
  
“No, but!” Harry caught his breath after that moment. “What I meant to tell you—what I was saying was the Always On part— _it_  can help. It might be the key, Draco. Just…just alter it, a little.”   
  
“You’re thinking chain reaction, Harry?”   
  
“Absolutely!’ Harry was triumphant. “Spell the sample with Contrarium iuri, send it to DOM for regular return, spell it again with an altered Always On, and then bob’s your uncle—it’ll do the job. Go there-go wherever!—and back again, no problem.”   
  
“It….maybe it’ll be too much, Harry. Um.”   
  
“You’re thinking about it, though—right?’   
  
“Might fizzle.”   
  
“Likely won’t,” Harry countered instantly. “Machine will make it not. Good for something, that.”   
  
“Thing is…thing is…” Draco was thinking, visibly so, his forehead wrinkled fiercely, a hand sifting through his hair. “That’s not all, Harry. You do still require some way of controlling it—no! Not so much that, but more…knowing it’s strong enough, that it’ll get a person there and back. Not send them awry or right back into…whatever. A way to see…clearly see.  _Know_.”   
  
“Almost like a lumos, you mean?” Harry asked casually. “A magical torch in the dark?”   
  
“Yes…Yes!” Draco hopped up ad began pacing. “That’s it exactly! Something—some device that will always be accurate, always be on, just like the portkey, but will be visible. From miles, Harry. Parallels. From anywhere, and something that’ll—”  
  
Harry had also jumped to his feet, a hand rubbing his jaw absentmindedly.   
  
“Is there any way, d’you think, to make it so there’s a…there’s a gauge on it? I mean I know it comes back from keying to DOM amped up. Send it again and it doubles, triples and so on as you repeat. But to say to an observer, say, ‘yes, this is Veil-ready; this can go there and do it, have enough oomph?’ Draco?”   
  
Draco was dancing about the crenellations, his face completely twisted up with a species of barmy exhilaration.   
  
“Draco?!”   
  
“Lumos…Harry—Lumos! It’s so fucking simple! It’s just light!”   
  
“What? Wait—“  
  
“Yes! That—it’ll—we can add it on, Harry! We can! Shine a light on the subject, for godssake! Cause it’s no good for anything else, is it? My silly super spell? You now that, I know that—Snape knows that, but this! This is good! This is  _purpose_ , Harry—this is  _why_!”  
  
“Well, shit!” Harry exclaimed. “Yes, I see. I see where you mean, where you’re going with that, but—you think? Really, Draco?”  
  
“Yes!” Draco was at the door already tugging on his coat. “We can do this. It only takes fiddling to attach it properly. Come on, love—back to Emma. We’ve a whole night ahead of us, just calculating!”   
  
“Oh blast! Oh-fuck!” Harry tore after. “Bloody fuck, you’re right—send Creevey for coffees then? Snape’s due in tomorrow afternoon, wouldn’t it be grand to simply show him? His face!”   
  
“Not a chance, Harry. Never have all that worked out by tomorrow, not a fucking chance. But we can give him an inkling, enough to go on with, maybe. If we can sort just how—”  
  
“The third tier of potion’s tubes on the right side isn’t in use yet, Draco!” Harry was thinking furiously aloud, gesticulating. “And maybe use colours, you know. For places—red for the Veil, green for—”  
  
“Elves will do coffee—dinner on tray—shag when we’re tired—”  
  
“Of course! What are we waiting for, then? Let’s go!”   
  



	6. Chapter 6

_**“…in conclusion, although data still needs to be collated and applied at this point, we feel that we have developed a working model of a super portkey of sorts, one that will cross the wormholes between commonly perceived barriers of state, and have also safeguarded its function as much as possible, allowing practical use in the near future…”  
  
~Extract from the preliminary draft joint Dissertation submission of D. Malfoy and H. Potter, Flamel U. 2002. **  
  
Flamel , Emma’s Lab, Vernal Equinox, 2002, late—or rather, very early in the day. _  
  
  
“I think….I think we’ve got it, maybe.” Draco doesn’t seem overly certain, even as he turns the latest portkey over and over in his hands. Behind him the Machine hums happily, pleased with itself. Harry Potter remains collapsed on the cot tucked behind a screen in the now cordoned off area where their makeshift ‘office’ is. “Attaching the miniaturized argon gas bulb and this dial seems to be working…mostly. Creevey’s still pretty much as he ever was…I guess that’s success?”   
  
He scratches his head, still turning the key over and over.   
  
“Meh,” his partner groans and rolls over. “Don’ care. Knackered. Done now.”   
  
“Well, of course,” Draco mumbles. “So am I, twat. Been three days, now.”   
  
“Goin’ ta’ sleep; go away,” Harry mutters darkly, squirming about sufficiently to bury his face into the flattened pillow. “Wake me up to chat, Malfoy, and I’ll murder you.”   
  
Draco tuts, shrugging. “Slacker,” he says, but under his breath. “You never listen, do you?”   
  
Harry doesn’t reply, doesn’t rise to the bait. For a long moment, the only sound is his breathing, slowing rhythmically in time to Emma’s happy hum. Draco cocks his chin, leans forward and drops the portkey on his cluttered desktop in a tray marked ‘Series 3’ and then stands gracefully to stretch. It’s a long languorous motion; he’s a tall fellow, all pale as a midnight ghost in his lab robes, his white-blond hair and wax-pale skin a series of building flames in the cool dank of the basement laboratory.   
  
There’s the very faint sound of his spine popping as the kinks caused by hours and hours of poring over figures relentlessly work themselves free; the sound of his yawn as he opens his turned-down mouth very wide. He stretches his arms high above his head as he turns this way and that, setting himself to rights.  
  
Harry doesn’t move, the sod. Even though he normally very much likes to watch Draco’s doings, maybe make a crack about his height, his poncey bearing—his dislike of the physical discomfort that goes along with working a Wizard’s fingers to the bone in what could be considered a hole in the ground.   
  
He blinks in the dim light when he’s finished with his stretch. Harry’s a quiet lump on the cot but Draco, his head clearing of the mists, is positive he’s not really fully into REM yet. He’s too much an ‘aware’ sort of bloke; he won’t sleep for real ‘till he knows what Draco’s planning to do next—crawl in beside him or go off somewhere else, leaving him alone with Emma.   
  
One swift pivot of heel on flagstone indicates Draco’s not departing. A wave of his hands lessens the Machine’s persistent buzz and hum to a level almost sub-aural. The lights, such as they are, burn very low.   
  
“Harry,” Draco murmurs, coming close by the cot. He bends over it, placing a gentle hand on Harry’s nape. Which flinches. Harry ‘mmmphs’ but doesn’t stir otherwise. “Harry, you know Flamel’s got this thing they do every year, this party. I know you’re not fond of parties, but…”   
  
Harry remains a lump, apparently out to the world.   
  
“Still.” Harry, were he actually paying heed, could have seen Draco’s throat bob as he swallows. “On cross-quarter day. Muggles may not follow it, I don’t know. Think they do, though.” Draco’s voice is soft and reflects nothing other than mild curiosity; his hands takes up a steady stroking motion through the dark mass of Harry’s overlong hair, his hip nudges the edge of the narrow bed. “May Day, though. It’s held on May Day.”   
  
There’s a very small sound issuing from Harry Potter’s chest, a little like a rumble. But it’s a pleased one, not angry. Draco sighs, licks his lips, blinks and keeps stroking, not even pausing as he goes down on his haunches by the side of the cot.   
  
“Harry, we’ll have turned it in by then. For good or ill, so….D’you want to celebrate, maybe? I mean I know you’re not much for parties, but…”   
  
He holds his breath, waiting. It’s been since they came to Flamel, the two of them, fresh from NEWTS at Hogwarts, shepherded by Draco’s godfather, by Harry’s ex-Potions prof, the oddly miraculous and very canny Severus Snape. Draco recalls Snape’s diatribe as he informed him of his decision for their future, neatly taking it straight out of their hands:  
  
“It’s enough,” he’d huffed, pacing the measure of his restored Headmaster’s office, kicking up small puffs of dust from the ancient carpet. “You’re both too powerful and too mule-headed to be let loose on an unsuspecting world,” he’d stated, as if this was the last word on the subject. As if Draco didn’t have a Manor to help his parents sort out and Harry didn’t have friends who cared for him and a career waiting in Aurors. Snape had turned from the bank of windows with a theatrical billow and fixed them where they sat perched nervously on chairs with a level and quite stern stare. “You, Draco, are selfish. And you, Potter, are completely heedless and spoilt. I blame this on your elders, naturally—” He throws up his hands at them, at the world, at the past. “A more sorry lot of adults I’ve never before witnessed. Clearly not one of them understands the inner workings of schoolboys.”   
  
Harry’s mouth had dropped open in shock; he’d nearly surged out his seat in indignation.   
  
“Now, hold up just one bloody—who the fuck do you think you are, Snape?” he’d shouted, face going red. Draco remembered sitting back at his leisure in the uncomfortable chair, ready to watch the fireworks—let Potter do his work for him, in a way. “There’s no sodding way you of all people are deciding  _my_  future!” Harry shouted.   
  
Draco had nodded along. He—they—were nearly nineteen. The war was finally ended. There’d been some sort of a future stretching ahead of them…at long last. It was vaguely bright, actually, and he was looking forward to doing what he wanted for once. Not what his Father demanded, not what the Dark Lord exacted in blood and fear—not what some damn prophecy of Potter’s foretold.   
  
“Hear, hear,” he’d cheered and his godfather, now publically acknowledged as such, glared at him with such force he quite thought his forehead was tanning. “I mean, ye—”  
  
“Hush!” Snape ordered peremptorily. “Sit!” he barked at Potter. Which he did, promptly, even as he looked to be very mutinous indeed. Draco couldn’t help but slide his eyes sideways, observing Potter. Git was as mercurial as always. Rather…fascinating, actually. Hidden depths.   
  
It had occasionally occurred to him, just in passing, that he’d like the chance to plumb those depths. To understand Potter, more than he ever had before. Because there was much that was still oblique and hidden about him, for all his dramatics. Despite the fact everyone seemed to think they knew exactly how Harry Potter was feeling.   
  
Intriguing, whatever it was Potter hid from the world. Hiding in plain sight, he was, and Draco could relate to that.   
  
“There is no better goal for a young Wizard, gentleman,” Snape’s tone was velvet, or perhaps, steel fist garbed in velvet. He advanced towards them where they sat, a commanding crow in academic plumage. “Then to pursue a higher form of education. You are both gifted”; he seemed to choke a bit as he paused to draw breath, “and also horribly, terribly unprepared. Unready and truly unable to take up the lives of responsible citizens, no matter what ether of you might claim. Thusly, I have taken the liberty of consulting—”  
  
“…Pardon?’ Potter gasped, going bug-eyed. “Consulted, sir? But with whom?”  
  
“Your current version of guardians, Potter, if you must know.” Snape’s eyes could fry eggs at twenty paces, so black and hot they were. “In lieu of all others, deceased or otherwise unavailable like that git Black, the Weasley’s may be considered your family, blood or no. As such, they’ve something to say to your plans for the future. Now be quiet—I’m not finished.”   
  
“And mine, Godfather?” Draco couldn’t help but jump in. This tickled his sense of the ridiculous, long suppressed. “Whatever did my parents say to your plans for me, I wonder?”   
  
He couldn’t help but sound snide, supercilious. This was a farce, from start to finish. And he and Potter were both very much aware of it.   
  
“You will both attend Flamel University, Draco,” his godfather shot back instantly, “beginning this fall term. And there’s no need to fret; your parents, my dear godson, are fully in agreement. Further, they have taken it upon themselves to fund Potter’s education in full, as a part of the reparations the Ministry has pressed upon them. And, before you say another word, whelp, they are deeply grateful I’ve stepped in with a working solution.”   
  
“Pardon?” It was Draco’s turn to drop jaw. Peripherally he could feel Potter’s wide eyes upon him, wondering, guileless. “What did you say, just now? Because I hardly think—”  
  
What he thought didn’t seem to be worth a half-Knut’s weight.   
  
“They are grateful, trust me on this, Draco,” Snape grated. He loomed over them both, the force of his presence a palpable cloud in the light-drenched aerie that was the Headmaster’s office. All about them were the remnants and mementos of past Headmasters, Dumbledore in particular. All about them was the murmur of quiet approval, as the portraits stirred in their frames, watching with bated breath.   
  
“More than that, Potter, the Weasleys feel you are in need of a time removed from the public’s eye. A university setting will provide that. It is a safe and nearly unassailable refuge. But—of greatest import—”  
  
“But, professor!’ Potter never knew when to keep his trap shut, it seemed. Draco grinned into his sleeve, distracted for a moment from the fact his own parents had apparently sold his soul down the river for the foreseeable future and placed him square in the hands of a crotchety old coot with a decide love for ten-foot essays and arcane information. “I’ve—there’s  _Aurors_! Shacklebolt just said—to me and Ron! I can’t! What’s more, you can’t me make me! You’ve no authority over me, Snape!”   
  
“Oh, yes, you can,” Snape thundered, “and you will, Potter. You are not fit in any way to join the Auror Squad—not now and perhaps not ever. You’ve been unduly influenced by that damnable prophecy. You are not of your right mind yet, or so Madame Pomfrey assures me. And the Order, what remains of it, agrees with me. You’ve been diverted, Potter, and it’s up to someone of sense to take your reins up and set you straight! I happen to be in a position to do so—and so I have. There’s nothing further to say on the subject, other than to clear up a few last minute details.”   
  
He folded his arms, Snape did, like Jove on Olympus, but Harry Potter was quite unimpressed.   
  
“I—no! You can’t, Professor—you just can’t! I won’t have it!”   
  
“Potter.” The word was doom, incarnate. Harry jolted as if shot and sank back down into his spindly chair. Draco couldn’t help but snicker softly. “Potter, for once in your impossibly nonsensical lifetime, you will do as you are told. Go to Flamel, study. Relax in the anonymity of school life; learn and work hard. Stop being a bloody-minded child for once and transfigure yourself into a real man, Potter—a real  _Wizard_. You owe it to your parents. To Lily. To yourself, for Merlin’s sake. You’ll end up a disgrace, otherwise—and you know that, too, Potter. I shouldn’t have to even remind you.”  
  
That last seemed to stopper Potter’s gawping gob altogether. He blinked silently and went quite pale. His hands shook a bit as they curled about the arms of his chair.   
  
“…And me?” Draco piped up finally, arching an eyebrow. “Who or what do I owe anything to, Godfather, other than the bloody Ministry? What’s the point of sending  _me_  off to a veritable academic nunnery?”   
  
“ _You_ , young Master Malfoy,” Severus Snape purred, quick as you please, “are an ill-trained wastrel and an incipient bully. I hardly trust you on a jinxed school-issue broom much less swanning about the environs of this so-called ‘New Era’ Potter has landed upon our collective heads. You will benefit from further discipline of mind and spirit and—”  
  
“Oh, hardly! That’s not fair, God—”  
  
Snape’s voice overrode his like the Express tore down the tracks, making time.   
  
“—and you are most definitely in need of a greater degree of self-control. You may know much, Godson, and you may indeed be an excellent student, even on a par with that Granger chit, but you are far from the Wizard you can be. University will set you straight, never fear. Off you go, and with your parent’s blessing. Furthermore, with the Ministry’s, and that’s where you  _will_  thank me later. At this point, my boy, you are well nigh unemployable.”  
  
“No! No, just listen, Professor!” Harry Potter, never one to stop when the stopping was good, burst out once more. Was joined by Draco, who objected to being managed and had never owned up to the most even of temperaments.   
  
“Bloody Sodding Salazar bollocks, Godfather, you can’t do this! Not to me—not us! He’s—he’s Harry Potter, for all that’s holy!”   
  
“I can.” Snape stepped back with a swish. “I have.”   
  
He beetled his brows at them.   
  
“You will, trust me. Both of you. And if I need employ an Unforgiveable far more effective than Imperio, Potter,” he sent an especially evil-eyed glint Potter’s way, “I shall. Don’t think I won’t.”   
  
“I. I—alright,” Potter sighed. “You win, Professor. For _now_.”  
  
Draco watched as Potter’s gaze dropped abruptly. The young man stared down at his shoes, shuffling them uneasily, and Draco found himself feeling a very small pang of sympathy.   
  
“Indeed I do, Potter—as always. Now, Professor McGonagall has the particulars for you: dorm assignments, permission slips, the required text list. You’ll find the Malfoys’ have already conveyed the majority of what’s needed to the campus.” He smiled sweetly at his godson. “Draco, ensure that you owl them a note, thanking them for their generosity. And may I say, the best of luck, boys—and good sodding riddance. I shall expect great things of you both. In fact, I shall be checking up on you both to ensure it. Off you go, now. Exeunt!  
  
There was a bright sparkling whirl that matched the movement of the tip of Snape’s suddenly visible wand; a blast of soundless warm air and the tinkle of fairy laughter in their ringing ears, and they’d found themselves deposited summarily at the foot of the stairs leading up to Headmaster’s office, obviously dismissed. Sprawling over and under one another, completely entangled, with Draco’s lips not a quarter inch from Potter’s parted ones.   
  
“Well!” Potter had gasped in Draco’s face. “Well, bugger  _me_  for a lark! That old goat!”   
Draco, struggling to untangle himself from the mess of limbs and robes Snape’s unspoken spell had placed them into, could only nod blankly.   
  
“Right…right.”   
  
A new start. A university degree at the end, maybe, which was rather something very special in a world that considered a Witch or Wizard set for life after only what amounted to a Muggle O-levels education.   
And Harry Potter, tied to him as surely as by means of Incarcerous…his ever-present, ever-irritating, ever-fascinating companion in this new adventure.   
  
“Maybe,” he’d groaned. His head ached something fierce. His body tingled, where it was budged up against Potter’s smaller one. And his groin…well that was a completely absurd part of him, perking up as it was, what with all the sudden bodily contact. How long had it been since he’d gotten one off? “Maybe I will, Potter, but don’t be counting on it or anything. You’re still a wanker. And still appallingly poorly dressed.”   
  
“Why, you!”   
  
Potter hadn’t bothered even trying to extricate them; he’d simply reached out with both hands, surged his boney hips up and grappled Draco from where he lay, half propped on a pointy elbow. And it must have been Satan himself that impelled Draco lose what remained of his mind and plant a hasty, sloppy smooch on the twisty-spry little twat, just to halt the stream of verbal abuse Potter was spewing—or so he maintained to himself, later.   
  
But it must’ve been Circe—or maybe Aphrodite  _her_ self—that had Potter halting his attack. Going stock still and then responding, his tongue quick as his Firebolt, squirmy and hot as fuck as he threw himself against Draco’s person for a whole other purpose.   
  
They’d nearly shagged right there, right then. Draco still blushed when he recalled it.   
  
…Which set of circumstance landed them both ultimately in Emma’s lab, three years on. Messing about with light and altered states of existence (simple spells made complicated) and purely exhausted, only month or so away from achieving their much sought-after Magis Magisteri. Him, hunched up uncomfortably over a mussed up cot and with both hands feathering across the back of a pretending to be sleeping Harry Potter, fingertips drifting down a knobby spine under work-filthy robes with calm deliberation.   
  
Harry, playing dead maybe, but listening for all he was worth, for they’d never done this before. It had always been happenstance, been the acts of others that had thrown them together. All this long time and never a plan in their heads when it came to each other.   
  
Draco—finally—had had enough of that bosh.   
  
“Harry,” he said calmly, his eyes drying out in the dark they’d been wide open for so very long. Three days, three years, a lifetime. Surely Harry owed him this? “I know you can hear me. Harry, I’m asking you this once, alright? One tiny little favour to me, that’s all—just one. Beltane, Harry. Beltane; it’s coming. A dance—the biggest one of the year. I want to go, so…come with me?” 


	7. Chapter 7

_**“The Malfoy-Potter Self-Activating EMMM-Based Cross Barrier Portkey™ is, naturally, still in the very early stages of experimentation and development. However, we can knowledgably state that all disparate components of the device are enormously successful and that the preliminary results (see Appendices) indicate that the end result—a relatively risk-free form of distance transfer—will be vastly successful indeed, in returning select persons or objects from areas previously believed unreachable by common mortals…”  
  
~Extract from the preliminary draft joint Dissertation submission of D. Malfoy and H. Potter, Flamel U. 2002. **  
  
  
Flamel U, Edinburg Main Campus, The Greene, Beltane, 2002, dusk. _  
  
  
“Dance, Harry?”   
  
Harry smiled up at his accoster, just the softest of grins and rather indulgent, and glanced at Draco Malfoy’s waiting arms. They’d practiced, over and over again, all the traditional dances. As well all the words of the prayers to the Great Mother, to the ancients and those souls who’d come before—even those who might rise again if asked properly. Well…it was more that Draco knew them and coached Harry intensively, but still—they’d practiced, and Harry couldn’t say he’d not enjoyed the dancing bit.  
  
“Oh…yes. Don’t mind if I do.”  
  
Draco smiled, pleased, pressing forward impatiently.   
  
“C’mere, then,” he grinned, pouncing. ”Been waiting all day to have a go.”   
  
It was all cheers and mad laughter amongst friend and stranger alike; prayers and runes drawn with ashes in the dirt. To the Green Man, to the Lady. To the solemn, merry-eyed Sidhe who watched silent and swaying from the shelter of Flamel’s forest (for what Wizarding institution of higher learning would be complete without some form of Forbidding Forest?) To the Willow, son or grandson of the original Whomper. To the waters of the wind-ruffled loch, lapping dark in the distance.   
  
Harry sighed as he was swung round, for this was momentous, this Night.   
  
To all who attended to the unicorns and the centaurs, who pranced about the edges of the three great bonfires, the former sparkling and the latter drinking deep of flowing mead, proclaiming scraps of foretellings like mad things to the moon’s rise. To the great mass of the student body and the faculty, residing and visiting, milling and mingling in a susurration of joy-stained cacaphony. To Snape, who stood a little ways away, quaffing some potent clear brew with a much-aged Rubeus Hagrid. They were gathered In a little knot of people, with all the eldest most revered Hogwarts staff, here for a short while only to pay their respects to Flamel and thus to the eldest of the very few schools of higher lore.   
  
“You just want the chance to dip me again; I know you,” Harry accused as he was expertly bobbed and gavotted, but he was grinning like a wild thing in the light of the fires.   
  
“Of course not,” his elegant partner returned severely, mouth twitching. “How undignified. Never dream of it.”   
  
 _And_ —and of course promptly reeled Harry in for a rib-cracking hug; spun his twisting, stepping person back out again, smooth as silk and to full arm’s extension. Just as abruptly clasped the smaller man to his heaving breastbone once more, but tenderly, only to bend him over one taut arm, till the rumpled black hair nearly dragged on the trampled grasses.   
  
“Of course not,” Harry gasped, with admirable aplomb, when he was upright. “No, never.”  
  
“No,” Draco laughed. “Never. Don’t mind that last. Was just a dip in the road.” Giggled, actually, in an excess of high spirits.   
  
“You’re the dip,” Harry snorted and watched with glittering eyes as his lover drew close. “Nutter.” His smiling lips, swift as swallows flying, coming to land upon Harry’s. “Insane chap.” Kissing him for all they both were worth, and halting them dead to rights by the largest of the fires for a moment to do it. “Mad as anyth—”  
  
“…Mad for you, Potter,” Draco whispered, the heat of the kiss dying down to sweet drafting’s of parted mouths over flushed skin. “Mad as anything.”   
  
Harry gulped where he was held, still gently revolving, knees gone wobbly.   
  
“Oh, my,” he muttered, burrowing his pink face into his lover’s undone collar. “You do choose your moments, don’t you? Blighter. Why’re you always chatting me up, anyway? You already have me; you know that.”   
  
Draco swallowed hard, glanced away for the briefest of moments. Closed his eyes, as if pained.   
  
“I…like to make sure, Harry.”   
  
“Well...you  _do_. Be sure, then.”   
  
For it was publish or perish; it was a hellhound-eat-horehound world, academics. But…they’d  _thrived_. Been conferred after a triumphant  _viva voce_. Had met and exceeded Headmaster Snape’s expectations. Would pace with hard-learnt solemn dignity down the Great Walk of Commencement come the twenty-first day of June, the last and long-awaited day of their fast-paced journey through the annals of education, and emerge fit at last for all the whirlaway, wooly-headed world might toss their way.   
  
“Right, right,” Draco grinned hastily and the awkward moment faded away to nothing. “…Thank you.”  
Forge careers. Be independent. Be as they were meant to be, were the world what it should’ve been, decades before they were born. A gleeful Snape had positively  _smirked_ all through the presentation to the Governors, the canny old git. They’d forgiven him for it, too.  
  
“No biggie….just. Don’t doubt me.” Harry peeped at his partner. “Just…dance with me. Keep on dancing with me, Draco—you’re actually pretty good at it, yeah?”  
  
“Always did have a keen sense of timing, actually,” Malfoy shrugged nonchalantly. “And natural rhythm. Now, come on— _you_  keep on dancing, Harry. People will notice if you make a mess of it now. All my good work will have gone to waste.”   
  
“Right,” Harry replied and stepped back into the beat of the music, just as Draco had shown him countless times over the last few pell-mell days. “Right-oh.”   
  
“Super.” Malfoy inclined his head pleasantly, then cocked it. “Oh, brilliant, this one’s the Dargason, Harry. Shake a leg now.”  
  
“You know? I like the way you move,” Harry remarked out of the blue a little later, as they came together in passing. “You’re pretty decent.” As usual, Malfoy was a live-wire on the dance floor. Or rather, the Greene, as it was grass they trod and paced so effortlessly. A moment, a moment, another partner and ten he was faced again with his smiling lover. “At this dancing lark.”  
  
“ _I_ like the way you fuck,” Draco riposted as soon as he was able, and charmingly inclined the long neck Harry had marked brilliantly a few hours earlier, away in the lab, when they’d put Emma to bed for the last time. “You’re not half bad,” he added, on the next meet-up, “Harry my love, at the shagging lark.”   
  
“Oh—oh!”  
  
Harry flushed. Stumbled for a split-second as Draco reached out to sweep them nimbly aside. Other dancers on the fringes immediately fell to, filling the gap they’d left. It was all to be different again; the times, they were a’changing.  
  
“So,” Draco grinned as if it were nothing, leading them both in a series of small twirls, minding the beat of the drums if not the formal steps themselves, “you want to come away with me, then, dark handsome stranger? I could…p’raps provide you some more pointers.”   
  
“Shameless,” Harry laughed. “Flirt!”  
  
Come autumn term, their dear old Emma would be the intellectual wellspring of some other student’s dissertation, the springboard for a new set of wet-behind-the-ears students’ ardent studies. Ages old, built of parts and bits and pieces, of whatever was laying about at the time of need. Patched and cracked, mended and polished, Emma was yet a wonder. A construct unparalleled, borne of brass and fixtures, Muggle bits and Magic bones. This day—this Beltane day—they’d hung May boughs at all the entrances and exits to the lab; all across the filing drawers, brilliant green against the aged wooden cases—all across the intermittent porthole windows, ringed shallows of stone on stone, bespelled to view ever-changing scenes of Stonehenge, of Hogwarts, of Diagon Alley. Familiar sights, three years into the New Era. They’d spent any number of weekends dashing away to them all, gasping for a break in the slog.  
  
“Very,” Draco agreed. “But…only for a very few do I even bother.”   
  
He’d miss Emma. So would Draco, for all his cool calm, take on leaving the oily, singed-rubber smelling, always humming, oddball conglomeration of pipes, polished brass and Tesla tubing behind.   
  
“…You do?” Harry gasped, as if this was a surprise, Draco approving the way his body worked. “How few?”   
  
“One.”   
  
“Really, now. I never guessed,” Harry chortled and Draco smirked a thin upper lip at him fondly even as he bent to kiss him.   
  
“Fishing,” he chided, between kisses. “You’re fishing. Just ask me, Harry, should you want me to murmur sweet things into your shell-like little ear. You know for fact I’ll say you anything you want me to. Anything at all.”   
  
“….love you, too,” Harry muttered, choking up just a bit on the sweetness of it all, but he wasn’t certain Draco heard. He cleared his throat; attempted to clear his head, shaking it at the glowing eyes, the brilliant split of Draco’s best smile. “Charming git.” The music had gone very loud behind them, almost deafening. “Awful flirt. ‘Course, I’m the idiot who happens to love you even when you’re being purely awful. Like now, f’r’nstance.”  
  
Draco slipped one greedy hand down Harry’s back, fondling the sensitive place where his waist met his hips through the intervening fabric. Harry shivered, though the fires were possibly more intense than ever. “Now you’re just being mean, Potter.”  
  
“Not  _mean_.”   
  
Traditional, the music, as were the boughs of May, the Pole, the romping country dance-turned-slow, sprawling not-a-waltz Draco had drawn Harry into. The beat of drums and high eerie-sweet wails of the pipes. Persistent, as regular as the seasons, as the greening of the world after winter.  
  
“Not, actually. Just surprised you’d—”  
  
“What? Admit I’d do just about anything? Of course I would.”   
  
“Of course you would,” Harry echoed and stared up into intent grey eyes, flashing bright in the flickering lights, deathly serious where they lay upon him.   
  
“Never doubt it.”   
  
Harry flushed, warm all over, without and within.   
  
“I would, too, you know.”  
  
“I know.”   
  
…And just hours ago they’d strewn whitethorn and furze all over the smoothed-out counterpane of their nicked cot down the Lab, drenching it with scent and good omens the creaky-jointed metal-boned pallet Draco had been insistent he’d be stealing away from Flamel to take with them.   
  
‘Use it as a guest bed or something,’ he’d muttered, almost to himself, really, and Harry had had a bit of a time keeping his face from cracking up into a silly grin as he watched Draco nod high-handedly over all their collective memories.   
  
“ _Not_  that I’m encouraging anyone to actually bunk with us,” Draco had added after a little silence, blinking at the dust motes that swarmed the fading sunlight over their respective heads. The single shared pillow had smelt of sweat and comfort, dried lavender and hints of the wild Forest. He wrenched his head abut and scowled at Emma, who hummed companionably at them. “Don’t want to…shock them. Over much. ‘Specially not that giant ginger git of yours, Potter. He’s a pain and half most days. Imagine him going and on.”   
  
“You won’t shock Ron,” Harry had assured him, stretching luxuriously and momentarily dreading the thought of dragging himself upright for a dash up to their rooms and into the shower; he was bloody comfortable right where he was. “He’s grown accustomed to only ever seeing me with a Malfoy attached to my hip. Used to it.”   
  
“That’s good,” Draco grumbled, settling back and burrowing his face into Harry’s bare shoulder. “And about damned time. One less bother to bother over.”   
  
“You’re the bother, bother mine,” Harry rolled over to languidly poke at a lovely serried line of ribs cast under pale skin. “Always jumping out on me when I least expect it.”  
  
“And you’re the idiot, Harry, for not expecting me to jump on your whenever I can,” Draco shot back, jolting away from the tickle of fingertips as he raised his bed-shaggy blond head. His eyes gleamed and he parted his lips, licking them where they’d already been kissed to the point of lush puffiness. “Ah…speaking of, ahem,  _doing it_? We’ve got a little longer yet. No need to…hurry.”   
  
“You’re always in a hurry, Malfoy. Is your middle name.”   
  
Malfoy had growled and shown Harry the meaning of ‘hurry’. They’d made to the showers with not ten minutes to spare and turned up on the Green at a mad dash, knowing Snape would be looking for them.   
  
“Really,  _really_ ,” Draco returned now, and Draco flirting in dress robes was immensely delicious as he shifted them about the makeshift dance floor. “I do approve. You’ve definitely demonstrated progress, Potter, on all fronts.” Harry grinned as he was expertly spun, dipped again—apparently for the hell of it—and spun again, all in quick succession. “Speed, precision—all the important aspects, really.”   
  
“Yes?” he lifted a brow, unashamedly fishing. “Tell me more?’  
  
“I’d say…in a pass/fail situation, Potter, you’d most definitely pass. With flying colours.”   
  
Oh, and the raggedy old cot would be spirited away to their bespoke flat; that was a given. Draco was set on it. In London, of course. Come the twenty-second. A strange souvenir…but Harry rather thought they’d keep it their whole lives through, the way it was going now.   
  
“ _My_  colours, Harry.” The blond mop of breeze-mussed wheaten silk was close by Harry’s ear, the voice an intimate drawl. “Only mine, ever, all over your body, everywhere where I can paint them.”   
  
“Mmm.” Harry let his eyelids fall, as they were heavy. That voice was drugging, all the toffee tones of it, promising forever. “You don’t say?”   
  
“Um,” Draco nodded, rubbing the tip of his nose into Harry’s sensitive ear. “I say. In fact,” he whispered, “I say wanna go again, right now? Little more compatibility data wouldn’t come amiss; we should always be testing, Harry, for variables. And me, I’m game.”   
  
Harry reared his head back, the better to see that slumberous look, the one that sent fireworks off in his belly every time.   
  
“Oh, hah! Of course you are, aren’t you? A whole month before us to do nothing but shag and drink and generally faff off, Malfoy,” Harry laughed up at him, twirling in time to the music. “And you want to do everything all at once? You sound more like me, you know? What happened to that celebrated Malfoy work ethic you’re so bleeding proud of? Here, I quite decided you were all freaky over ‘acceptable risks’, all this time. ”   
  
“Well…why not?” Draco replied airily, his smile having moved to hovering not an inch above Harry’s faded scar. He kissed it swiftly, mumbling as he came away. “It’s Beltane; it’s expected. We’re supposed to faff about, Harry, as much as we can. Good practice for weekends in the future.”   
  
“Um,” Harry dipped his chin and kept on grinning. It seemed he’d not stopped with stretching his lips into a smile for an eon; it was alright with him. “Right; do tell yourself that, Draco.”   
  
“I shall, believe me,” Draco winked. “And if I ever suggest to you another all-nighter, Harry, you’ve my permission to hex me flat. That bit’s over with, thankfully. We’re our own men, now.”   
  
“So true,” Harry agreed fervently. “Been a long had haul to get here, too.”   
  
Draco’s expression lightened into outright pleasure as another thought struck him. Harry was led into a fast two-step, a rollicking one that nothing to do with the reedy mournful pipes the ad hoc band of musicians was offering at the moment.   
  
“Mmh?” Harry prompted inquisitively, sensitive to the slightest of changes on that well-know face. “What, Draco?”   
  
“Oh, well, it’s just this, Harry. Now we’ve the time, I’ve taken a few books out the Restricted Section,” he threw out, eminently unconcerned with Harry’s fleeting frown over the words ‘Restricted Section’. “We need to expand our horizons of study, Harry,” he rushed on, leading them away from the closeness of the other dancers with a sudden determination. “Should never stop the learning process, right? And I think we’re lacking, just a bit.”   
  
“Lacking? What sort of books, Draco?” Harry demanded suspiciously, following along with the barest of hesitations. “If its Potions you refer to, I’m not helping you chop, not ever again. Nor dice, nor anything else that means me spending time with bile or worms or grubby, filthy  _ingredients_. Dig up Creevey or something, will you? Hire him for the summer term and make him do it. He’ll be glad to, I’m sure; he’s your little puppy.”   
  
“Creevy’s your acolyte, Harry,” Draco scowled, “and you know it—never nine. He’s only in the lab ‘cause he’s got a hard on for you. Has for years now. But, no, no. That’s not important now and not Potions, Harry,” Draco galloped on verbally, barely taking a breath and enfolding Harry into him with a deft twist of hip, his long legs planted firmly on the ground as they came to a halt at the very farthest edge of the main festivities. Here, the music was faded, dissipated but the sloughing of wind through the trees of the Forest. “Per se. More…manuals of incantations. Study aides—beginner texts. For sex magic, my little dubious man. The best sort of them all and we’ve not ever taken up even one of the course offerings, all this time here. Need to rectify that. Have a spot of swotting.”   
  
“Ah!” Even in the falling, fading light, even in the faraway reflected red glow of the great fires, Harry’s face was absolutely scarlet. “Ahhhh!  _Sex_ magic? You mean like—as in  _shagging_?! Magic for shagging? Oh, no you don’t! You—you wanker! Piss off! I’m not doing that, Draco! That’s—that’s completely unacc—”   
  
“…Ah.”  
  
There was a deadly silence. Draco tensed, every particle of him, as if Harry had struck a brutal blow to his midsection when he was least expecting it. He licked his lips, blinking rapidly, lashes tangling as they fluttered. Was clearly doing his best to maintain a bland face and not reveal his shock.  
  
“I see now. You object?”   
  
Harry peered at the white blur of face. The fires were dying down again, preparatory to the next round of feeding them. And Draco…Draco sounded as though he were being strangled.   
  
“Yes! Yes, of course I do!” Harry caught clear sight of Draco’s face by dint of shoving his own much nearer and rasped his reply, all the stillborn vehemence of his natural protests dying away in his throat. Something was abruptly terribly wrong; something he’d said—done. “I mean...no.”  
  
“Well,” Draco swallowed visibly, pained. His eyebrows, always a barometer of his emotions, levelled out into a studiously blank line. Which is it, Potter? Yes or…no?”   
  
“Draco!”   
  
“Is it me, then?”   
  
“Oh, gods, no!”   
  
Curiously ashamed, Harry buried his hot cheeks against the fine robes Draco had insisted they both purchase for this, the last of the University’s grand Events. This, functionally the social debut of the worst-kept secret of Flamel: that Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy had gone fully inseparable. That one couldn’t be found without the other, that they were joined at the hip, ofttimes literally, and that a person (and especially Creevey, who’d the annoying habit of creeping up) must absolutely knock before they dared enter the fastnesses of the EMMM lab.   
  
“Oh, god.  _No_ , of course not.” It wasn’t as though he could deny it—nor even that he wanted to. It was just… “Not you—of course not! Not really. It’s. Just….just.”   
  
“Harry?” Draco prompted instantly and they were moving smoothly again, as if the fraught pause had never happened. But his fingers were digging in fiercely where they lay at Harry’s waist and the loose clasp about Harry’s hand became perilously tense. “You’re not—I mean to say. Harry… _oh_. Oh, I get it now.”   
  
Harry snuffled, but kept mum, all the words clogging his throat. This was so very. So very raw. And perhaps they weren’t dancing as smoothly as all that. He could feel a tremor running through his partner, precursor to some new wild tangent, no doubt.   
  
“I…meant to say, it’s not. Of course. Ahem.” Draco cleared his throat uncomfortably. “It’s too much; you’ll want a break.” They’d lost their easy rhythm somehow even though they still moved together to the music. As if they were mechanical, automatons in place of living creatures. “Right, yes. I…see. It’s not too, too late,” he went on slowly, reluctantly. “You know?” As if he was being forced to speak, against his will. As if he’d been walloped by an idea that pained him greatly and he’d no choice but to sidle uneasily about the edges of it, poking to see if it would bite. If he’d fall into it, lose his footing. “Never too late, of course.”   
  
“Dra—”  
  
“To…to change plans, if you’d rather.” He hesitated, something he hardly ever did when speaking, and Harry felt the movement of his throat, caught the sour twist of lips out o the corner of his eye. “Been three years; of course you’d rather, right? Right.”   
  
“Wait, no—” Harry was about to say, but Draco went on regardless, his voice sinking to the nasally gravel of a person struggling gamely with some deep, dark disappointment.   
  
“Right, then. The Weasleys’,” he mumbled unhappily, jerking his chin to stare away elsewhere, anywhere, focusing on some distant view from over the top of Harry’s recently combed head. “I suppose they’d be quite glad of seeing you after all this time—you’ll be gagging for a break, I don’t doubt. Rooming together, working together—I mean, of course you’re tired—of me, naturally enough. Wasn’t as though you asked for—I assumed. I’m very bad, as I understand it, at assum—”  
  
It struck Harry that Draco was in midst of a crises, one he was desperately attempting to brush off. One he hadn’t actually expected, not at this late date. That he’d been abruptly cast into a welter of pain and Harry was somehow the trigger of it.   
  
“And I naturally didn’t think—you say I never do—” Draco laughed, but it was more like nails on a chalkboard. “You always say that, Harry. I’m…too impetuous, right? A real prize, I’m sure. No wonder—”  
  
Harry hadn’t meant—he’d  **never**. Oh, for fuck’s sake! How arse-ended could an intelligent bloke  _be_?   
  
Apparently very.   
  
“You fucking idiot!” Harry withdrew his flushed face from its shelter with alacrity and stared up aghast at his lover’s carefully composed features. What he could see of them, what with Draco looking anywhere but down at him, that was. “Always,  _always_  you go off half-cocked,  **assuming**  things! Wrong-headed things— _ridiculous_ things! As if I’d ever— _ever_ , Draco!  **Merlin**!”  
  
“Then…then what  _are_  you saying, Harry?’ Draco was genuinely puzzled as he blinked down at Harry. He humped a shoulder, opened his mouth a few times before actually managing to go on. “It’s. It’s just some books, a few spells, something to play with. Earn a little pocket change whilst we’re establishing ourselves; the allowance will only go so far, you know? And people are always casting for love philters, a little charm here and there; woo their intended. What’s the harm?”   
  
“No! NO!” Harry yelped, distraught. He banged a quick fist against Draco’s lapel. “There is no  _harm_ , idiot; that’s not what I’m saying at all. Not what I mean to say, at least. Why is it you never listen to me, Malfoy? I swear you’re just deaf as a post.”   
  
“That’s not true, Harry!” Draco looked incensed. “I listen all the time—more than you ever do, to me!”   
  
Harry snorted. “Hah! You do not, damn it! How long did it take to convince you we had to add that third loop to Emma’s relays?”   
  
“No, no, Harry.” Draco crinkled his forehead, peering closely at his bewildering armful. “I meant…I mean, I listen to you, Harry, always. Of course.” Tightened his grip, just to make sure. Potter had the habit of bolting off to parts unknown at times, when he was highly frustrated over one quandary or another. Off to brood, usually, and always to some horribly frightening high-altitude location.   
  
“What…well, what do you  _mean_ , Harry—tell me?” Draco always was the one going after him, talking him down. Instilling some sense into a situation. “Harry, I don’t understand? If you’re not objecting to  _me_ , then why the idea of sex magic? It’s only just another area to explore. There’s a lot to learn—”   
  
“C’mere.” Harry, never shy went it came to touching Draco, wrapped two very determined arms about his middle. Shoved his face into the citrus-scented hollow below Draco’s one ear. And muttered sullenly, in a growly voice just loud enough that Draco only had to strain a little to hear him clearly. “This,” Harry grunted, squeezing tight, “this is ours. No magic. No other….other extraneous shite. Nothing else, just us.”  
  
“Al...right. Alright, Harry.” Confused, Draco brought his chin down o the top of Harry’s head. They stood, the ones still in a mass of movement. “Yes, go on. Keep talking.”   
  
Harry drew back a few inches but kept himself decidedly within his partner’s embrace. Steadied his feet as they stumbled to a halt again, the other dancers whirling on oblivious about them.   
  
“I grew up Muggle, Draco,” he stated quietly. “For all I ever knew this whole world was nothing but kids’ tales and oddball fancies about dragons and sparkly unicorns and I really didn’t know much about  _that_ , either. No films, just the telly. And not much of that, either. So.” He shrugged. “So, it was the weirdest thing ever—it’s still weird, alright? I…even after all this time I suppose I’m still not quite accustomed. I don’t quite…believe. It’s not  _normal_ , Draco.”   
  
“Hmm,” Draco nodded, He didn’t know but maybe he could guess, just a bit. “Alright. Didn’t realize how much it…but, alright.” The way Harry tackled problems serially, then from all angles, worrying away at them. His maddening ways of always fiddling, poking continually at this and that minor conundrum, as if offended there were questions he didn’t know the answers to. The same guerilla-warfare ways of thinking that sometimes led to sudden brilliant strokes of genus; grand fusions of Muggle and Magic and Machine. Emma, Draco knew, adored Harry with all her mechanical heart. As did he. “…Go on.”   
  
“Right, so,” Harry drew in a sobbing breath. “It’s this…it’s.” He shoved forward, a controlled lunge of sorts, until he couldn’t have been more closely pressed against Draco than if he’d been glued there, roped there, spelled there. “I want…I want it separate. To stay  _apart._ Magic and _us_. I need it  _separate_ , Draco,” he repeated earnestly, his knuckles whitening as his hands gripped. “I want to always know in my head that there’s nothing,  _but nothing_ , between us but  _us_. Nothing….weird. No…no interference. No magic.”   
  
“There isn’t!” Draco protested instantly. “Harry—there isn’t! Never has—it’s always just been us, you twat! What else would it be?”  
  
“I know.” Harry brushed his lips against the small sculpted hollow at the base of Draco’s neck reverently. “I know. I do, really, but…Want to keep it that way, so…no sex magic. No magic of any kind, not for that. Not ever.”   
  
“But—but! Harry, you don’t even see,” Draco protested. “There’s nothing wrong with it if it’s used properly. It’s like any other spell—like Apparate or Lumos.“  
  
“Draco?” Harry set his lips mutinously, a sure sign he’d not be convinced, no matter what.   
  
“Oh! But you’re a world-class idiot, Harry,” Draco had to give him a little shake as he snorted away a surge of ire. “It doesn’t work that way; never has, you twat, but…but you’re so stubborn, you know? You don’t believe; I don’t  _why_ —but fine.  _Fine_. Whatever. We won’t, then. It was just an idea, exploring what’s out there; I thought it might amuse—”  
  
“Dra—”  
  
He shut up, bent his head and forced his mouth against Harry’s, all his swallowed-down frustration transferred in his kiss.   
  
“But if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, clearly. Sorry—my mistake.”   
  
“No. No, it’s alright. It’s just me…I mean, I know I’m a little odd, sometimes. And, erm…” The lips were hot as they travelled restlessly across forehead and into smoothed down hair, ruffling it back into its usual tumbled glory. Harry gasped with relief, his hips presented a grateful swivel against Draco’s own. “Thank you. Thank you, Draco.”   
  
“Whatever for?”   
  
“Listening to me. Hearing. You never do, not really.”   
  
“ _You_ never listen to me, either, twat. Even if you hear.”   
  
“No,” Harry smiled into Draco’s skin. “I don’t, usually. Because you’re a git and why should I? But this. This…is so. It’s  _impor_ —”  
  
“Shut up, then,” Draco interrupted impatiently. “I don’t have to listen, do I? We simply won’t—we just won’t speak of it. Topic closed, then. It’s stupid;  _you’re_  stupid and I’m sure one day you’ll come to your bloody senses, but for now—”  
  
“Love you,” Harry interjected hastily. “I do, you know.”  
  
“I love you, too,” Draco harrumphed, frowning. “So? What about it?”   
  
“Well. Can we…might we dance now?” Harry cleared his throat, glancing about them even as he imperceptibly settled out of the tense lines Draco’s little ‘idea’ had thrown him into. “People are—”  
  
“People are what, Harry?” Draco demanded shortly. “Having fun? What a concept, yeah?”   
  
“Oh shut it. It’s…” They were attracting notice. Snape was to be seen at a distance, staring over the sea of hats and garlanded heads, the beginnings of a scowl glimmering across his saturnine features. “Your blasted godfather’s watching us, Draco. Let’s dance. Dance some more, rather.”   
  
“Certainly,” Draco replied smartly, and swung Harry into motion. “Don’t know why we ever stopped,” he grumbled, jerking Harry’s body more fully into his arms. “Wasn’t my idea to have a domestic; supposed to be a party.”  
  
“Bosh.”   
  
“Not bosh. Kiss me then, Harry,” Draco added peremptorily, starting them back into to a slow sway with a swing of pelvis, a slow step sideways and back. “It’s Beltane, after all. Fertility festival and all that. Little display of affection for your lover wouldn’t come amiss. Show your mettle, gudgeon, if you really want them to look away from us.  _Make_  them.”   
  
“Gladly.” Harry snorted, fighting the dawn of a grin. Draco huffed, as if he were truly miffed.   
  
“I should say so.” Which he wasn’t, clearly. “Since you frightened me for no good reason. You  _owe_  me, Potter. I’m your partner.”   
  
“Yep.”   
  
They snogged, slowing their matched steps to sway in small pointless circles.   
  
“Brilliant, then,” Draco announced when he finally tore his mouth away, his glance darting about them, noting eyes on them. Smiling eyes, even his godfather’s. “Er, more, please. People are still watching. Fancy that. Come on.”   
  
“Um.”   
  
As one man, they edged toward the dark shadows of the nearby woods. Draco swiped a hand across his brow, smouldering darkly at the dampness that came away on the back of his hand.   
  
“And fancy this. I—I actually feel dizzy, Harry. All your fault, throwing me off my game. May need to lay down now. Ah…Join me?”   
  
“Lie down? Here, you mean?” Harry replied, nearly falling over his own feet in eagerness to go where Draco was leading him. “Oh!” he chirped, finally getting it. “Yes, okay. Please. You should, definitely. Don’t want you falling. You weigh a tonne; I’ll never get you up again.”   
  
“…Harry.”   
  
Draco blinked down at Harry as they stumbled off the Greene; touched his cheek fleetingly with the fingers of the hand not clenched tight about Harry’s elbow as he jerked them towards a copse nearby.   
  
“Is it…it is really alright, Harry? No last minute…? No worries? You’re not having…second thoughts, are you?”   
  
“Absolutely not;  _no_!” Harry nearly sprained his neck, shaking his head like a mad thing, twisting about to meet a pair of half-hooded eyes. “No,  _never_.”   
  
The white slash of smile briefly eclipsed the moonlit halo of Draco’s hair.   
  
“Excellent; that’s what I—I mean, good. Good. Really…very, very…good. To know.” Draco bobbed his chin, setting it firmly as he scanned the copses, searching out the nearest convenient location. They’d done this before; he knew of several. “Ah, er? Shall we?”   
  
“Oh, yes. Please.” Harry smiled sweetly. “You should have a little lie-down, yes. Let’s.”   
  
“Git. You’ll still pay for it, though,” Harry was warned kindly as he was dragged along. “I don’t scare easy, you know.”   
  
“ _You_.”   
  
Draco drew them to a stop at last, far from the madding crowd, planting Harry’s back against a nearby tree trunk. Gazed searchingly down at the face tip-tilted up toward him. Stared into green eyes dark with flickering shadows, darker still with the beginnings of passion and the ocean of feeling. Wet his lips in preparation. They’d done so well without all this nonsense for so long; it was difficult now. Hard to say.  
  
“Harry, I’ll always—you know I’ll always?”  
  
“I know _…I know_.” Harry darted forward and kissed him, lightly. “I do, Draco. Don’t—you don’t have to—just. Feeling’s mutual. Never doubt it.”   
  
He was summarily hauled downwards as Draco fell gracefully to his knees at the mossy foot of their tree.   
  
“Oi! Where are you—oh! I see.”  
  
“Yes, do please see. See here.” His hand was grabbed and firmly pressed against the bulge in Draco’s parted robes. “Better than that, feel, Harry. Now, please? Because I really  _must_.”  
  
“Yes.  _Yes_.” They toppled sideways, tearing at the fine robes, the trappings of ceremony. “Yes, Draco.”   
  
“ _Yes_.”   
  
“Ummmmm, yessss. Yes, yes, yes!”   
  
“Gods, yes.  _Always_  say that to me, Harry. Never stop.”   
  
“I always will, git—I always will.”   
  
  
  
 **Finite**


End file.
